computer restarts HELP!? :(
 

idk whats going on im completely clueless

at the character screen of:
Everquest
Dungeon Runners
Perfect World
my computer restarts for no reason,
but the weird thing is that im able to play:
WoW
RoM(Runes of Magic)
and D&D online
just fine with no problems..except for the expected lag..

(i know what your thinking.. and i only play one at a time i Dled the others to test them out i only have EQ and WoW installed atm)

i have a 2gig pcu (amd) ati x1600 pro 512mb 1025 ram
directx is up to date along with my vid drivers..

if anyone has any advice to help out or knows whats going on would very much appreciate it.

Well to start I would at least do a online virus scan and check your application and system logs. There is a small possibility that something is written to the event log before the reboot.

Your RAM is extremely low for playing most/all of those games. If you have page filing disabled, as soon as you run out of RAM, your computer will do stuff like that. Even with page filing enabled, most of the time it only adds half of what you already have, which would give you 786MBs of total possible RAM+Page file. That is extremely close to what EQ uses with max settings turned on.

It could also be that you just have bad RAM and when a certain section of the RAM gets used, it crashes your PC. PCs rebooting like that are normally hardware issues. It could be that your system is overheating, or videocard is starting to give out, or any large number of possibilities.

I agree with Trevius totally.

The things that I have found in the past that caused these types of things in the past.

1) Faulty stick of ram - for the same reasons Trevius stated.
2) Overheating or bad processor - Processors do not go out often but working in a retail repair environment I did see them go bad and everyone of them was AMD.
3) Bad power supply - Often when you hit a certain load the power supply will reset and reboot the machine. Crazy as it sounds I do see reboots caused by a flaky power supply.

EQ1 is horribly depending on the processor and will tack a single core at 100 percent, so this is harder on a single core processor. I will almost bet it is a heat problem.

well i have firewall/virus scanner and i dont have anything on my computer

and im always using the same( well not same but yeah ) computer i used to play EQ 1 and 2 with

Well entertain us and run a load on the computer, a benchmark type software that puts a load on the processor.

Actually, that should be plenty of ram if he's using XP and only running one copy of EQ. But I agree, restarts are often times heat related. I'd check temps while using a stress test and if they look good, I would run some memory and cpu diagnostics.

well ive had browser up, vent, 2 wow accounts up and running at the same time along with instant messaging up, and DLing stuff.

ive actually done the same with EQ before just no vent and that was on a computer that was worse than this one but yeah...

what would be good software to try out for the CPU stress test and the ram testing

But all of those apps do not even come close to working the processor like EQ does.

Try downloading something like Sandrasoft lite and running the processor stuff.

Mersenne Prime Search http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/ is what I use. It can really stress a system.

Yeah I forgot about that. Anything that is doing some type of DC computing will cook a system. I do BOINC stuff and that will tax all four of my cores to 100 percent.

well to be honest and i prolly sound like a noob to you guys or what not but yeah.. i used the mersenne one and did the benchmark test and seemed to "pass" that nothing really happened i used the sandrasoft one too and everything seemed fine

(correction on the problem) i can stay at the screen of character selection for EQ.. its when i click create and choose a different race is when it restarts i can chill at the main character screen for god knows how long.. ( if that makes any difference) i also took the upgraded graphics off the models cept the val shir ( if thats how you spell them lol i dont remember.

but yeah thank you guys for takin time to help me out.. even though i think im just going to have to throw this comp out haha

Just curious, have you tried updating your video driver ?

yeah i thought about that too so i reDLed the newest one today along with Directx ( even though i had it )