My pc shuts off and restarts and says "the system has recovered from a serious error" when I play hidden object games that I've downloaded. My older games that aren't as much KB or MB or whatever it's called play fine but the newer, larger games shut the pc down. This is the only time it happens, when I try to play games. I set my firewall to allow them but it didn't help.
I've seen suggestions it could be because the pc fans aren't working or overheating to dust to not enough memory to updating drivers to setting system managed file paging to viruses to re-installing the OS. I regularly delete temp files, defrag, disk clean-up, etc. The fans are working, the pc is clean, I have no extra programs that I don't need (after playing a game I uninstall it). I have 86% free space. This never used to happen but now it happens all the time, it's been doing this for a few months. Could it be a virus? I have basic free AVG 9.0, I thought that would stop or remove viruses, etc.
I can't afford to add memory but when I can if that doesn't help then I don't know what to do except re-install the OS but that won't help if it needs more memory will it? I know next to nothing about computers so I'd really appreciate advice from anyone who can help, thx!
P.S. My pc is a Compaq Presario SR171ONX
256 MB
I use Windows XP
It says "total paging file size for all drives = 344 MB", I set it to "system managed size".
It says "used space = 12.3 GB", "free space = 80.7 GB"
Total memory 256.00 MB
Available physical memory 56.34 MB
Total virtual memory 2.00 GB
Available virtual memory 1.96 GB
Page file space 552.32 MB
Page file C:\pagefile.sys