Vista - Can Someone Tell Me Why My Games Freeze on My PC?

Hi all,

I’ve been playing on my computer for a while and have noticed that whenever I play my games, my computer will freeze and hang up after about a couple minutes of playing into the game. The screen will freeze and whatever sound was playing will loop in the background. I cannot ctrl alt del out of the game and my computer requires a hard restart whenever this happens. I have been looking on some forums about this problem with games freezing and supposedly the fix was swapping the different RAM modules. I tried doing that but it still keeps freezing after playing for a bit. I then used Riva Tuner to turn up the fan on my graphics card to 100% but that did not help either. I have the latest drivers for Vista x64 too. I also tried playing the games in Windows XP (I am running both Vista and XP on my system) but the same thing happens. I then started to think if the 500W power supply was too low so we got a new 650W PSU, but haven’t put it in yet. Any suggestions?

Here are my specs:

Vista Ultimate 64-bit and Windows XP w/ SP3
Motherboard: ECS GF7050VT-M
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9450 @ 2.66GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM Corsair Dominator
Video Card: XFX NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+
Hard Drive: 500 GB Western Digital With Green Technology

Games I play that freeze: COD4, CODWaW, Fallout 3, Dead Space, Crysis, Crysis: Warhead, Far Cry 2, Mass Effect, Brothers in Arms: HH

Please Help!! Thanks!!