[Lori12]

I apologize if this isn't the correct forum, maybe someone can direct me to the correct place.

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

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One thing you can do is go to Start, Control Panel and double click on System. Choose the Advanced tab and then Settings under the Startup and Recovery section. Then uncheck the box next to Automatically Restart in the System Failure section. This will keep the PC from automatically rebooting when the failure occurs. The next time it crashes, you can write down and post the error message that comes up on the screen.

There are also options for reading the mini dump file generated during a system crash, but I can't recite the procedure from memory yet, as I'm still new with that aspect. I'll search around because I've seen it here before.

EDIT -> Ah, here we go. Follow rshaffer61's instructions in the post I linked to.

Edited by Spyderturbo007, 30 December 2009 - 02:42 PM.

[Spyderturbo007]

One thing you can do is go to Start, Control Panel and double click on System. Choose the Advanced tab and then Settings under the Startup and Recovery section. Then uncheck the box next to Automatically Restart in the System Failure section. This will keep the PC from automatically rebooting when the failure occurs. The next time it crashes, you can write down and post the error message that comes up on the screen.

There are also options for reading the mini dump file generated during a system crash, but I can't recite the procedure from memory yet, as I'm still new with that aspect. I'll search around because I've seen it here before.

EDIT -> Ah, here we go. Follow rshaffer61's instructions in the post I linked to.

Edited by Spyderturbo007, 30 December 2009 - 02:42 PM.

[Lori12]

Thank you Spyder. Can I ask though, don't I want the system to auto re-start? When it does it shows an error message with the specifics, is that what you're referring to me posting?

[rshaffer61]

The point is to halt the system so you can get the error information. Another way to do this is to:

Download BlueScreenView
No installation required.
Double click on BlueScreenView.exe file to run the program.
When scanning is done, go Edit>Select All.
Go File>Save Selected Items, and save the report as BSOD.txt.
Open BSOD.txt in Notepad, copy all content, and paste it into your next reply.

Thanks to Broni for the instructions and program