Vista - Mysterious crashes when playing games

I recently bought a new high performance PC, primarily for gaming.
It has a Intel Core Duo 3.0GHz processor, 4GB RAM, a Raptor (10.000 RPM)
disk, a X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatl1ty soundcard, and a nVidia 8800 GTS card (to
list the most crucial hardware), and came with Vista Ultimate pre-installed.
In Vista's built-in performance rating system (scale goes from 1.0 - 5.9),
the PC scores 5.6 on CPU, and 5.9 on everything else (5.6 baseline).

Apart from gaming, it is quite stable, but a few minutes after launching any
sort of game, it crashes.
All installed games have a "recommended graphics setting based on hardware".
Due to the PC's high performance, all games defaults to max settings. Until
it crashes, everything runs smoothly with high FPS counts. I hace tried to
lower the graphics settings to see if that helps, but to no avail.
I have also tried to deactivate the soundcard, and use the built-in MOBO
soundcard (which of course was deactivated in BIOS while using the X-Fi
card). That didn't make any difference either.
I have tried to stress the system through running max loading test in 3DMark
test programmes, but those run smoothly without any errors, and gives very
high hardware/performance scores.

The most irritating thing though, is the error messages, or lack of such.
All game crashes are followed by a pop-up dialog box saying something like
"An error occurred with 'hl2.exe' (or their like) and Vista has terminated
the process".

This happens to ALL the games I have installed (from different vendors)
including games that are specifically tested for Vista compliance. Sometimes
the game is just terminated, other times the whole system freezes or goes
blue-screen and starts rebooting.

There is absolutely noe help or patches at the game vendors home pages. I
have the latest drivers installed for all my hardware. Vista is up to speed
on updates as well. The instability and crashes only occurs when running
games. Other "heavy applications" runs like a dream.

Is this a local problem I'm having, or have anybody else experienced
anything similar with regards to gameplay?

Oh, and another thing. After a blue-screen-crash, Vista stops during reboot
and asks if I want to run some repair tool (recommended) or perform a normal
start up. I'm supposed to use the keyboard and select one of the options
followed by "enter". There's a clock counting down from 30 sec that will
start the highlighted choice in case I fail to select anything. However, if I
select the repair/check tool and hit "enter", the clock just resets to 30
seconds again and restarts the countdown. If I let it count down all the way
to zero, it resets itself to 30 seconds again. In other words, the
recommended procedure is unavailable, and only the normal boot procedure is
available (which BTW fortunately still works).

Any ideas or suggestions???

Try This:
Start -> Search Regedit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory
Management


Double click on "PagedPoolSize". Hexadecimal is listed first.
Change the "Value Data" to one of these below:
Note: You only need to enter EITHER Hexadecimal or Decimal.
They both are the same.
Code:

Megabytes Hexadecimal Decimal
192Mb 0c000000 201326592
256Mb 10000000 268435456
384Mb 18000000 402653184

You do not need anything bigger than 400Mb... in most cases 300Mb is too
much as well.

Once you are done, make sure you reboot your computer.

If this doesn't help, you can set it back to default by entering 0.

Enjoy!

"Norway" <Norway@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:EE1EA9B1-D87D-422A-8F18-91484A65D965@xxxxxx

Thanks for your prompt response Randy.

I hope your suggestion will do the trick.
BTW, when you say "in most cases 300Mb is too much..." do you mean 'too
much' as in overkill, or 'too much' in the sense that it will further
destabilize the system?

I have implemented the changes, set the key to 384 Mb. It's too soon to say
for sure that it helped.
So far, Half Life seems to be a bit more stable, however I've had 3 crashes
and one blue screen shutdown playing "Portal". I will leave the setting for a
day or two and see if I can see any significant changes.

Rgds

This is often related to defective RAM chips.

I suggest you to download Memtest86+ (www.memtest.org) and let it run for a
few hours.

If it finds any errors, your RAM is most probably damaged, so you will have
to replace it.

You can find out which module(s) are affected by swapping them in and out of
your machine.

Regards,
greeny