system problems

[chico64]

My computer has been running fine for about 4 months but yesterday after i up dated my drivers ,virus protction,windows and evrything else my system no longer will play a game without crashing babk to the desktop within around 20 to 40 min.all the temps are good ,alredy checked for spyware and adware and everthing is fine .tried checking for virusus but rebooted after about 4 hours.will a system restore help?Ihave tried many different drivers for my 9600xt ,5.4catlylist,5.3 catalyst,4.12 catalyst.Asus a7n8x-e delux mobo,radeon 9600xt card with 4.12 catalyst,768ddr2700 ,windows xp service pak 2 with all curent updates,amd athlon xp 3200,soundblaster live 4.1.,with updated drivers.

 

[UncleMacro]

will a system restore help?

You should just try the system restore and find out. See if the restore fixes the problem. If it fixes it, then undo the restore and return to your current state and see if the problem comes back. If it's hosed again then you know for sure your software updates caused the problem. Hardware has to start dying at some point and there's some chance your software updates had nothing to do with it. It's easy enough to use system restore to prove it was the updates. If restoring to before the updates works then you could just go back and do your updates one at a time and test after each one to see if it's still working. Once the thing starts croaking again you know that the last update caused the problem.

Did you slow down your AGP port to 4X or disable fast writes? If so, then the driver updates you've done took it back to AGP 8X with fast writes enabled. My machine croaks about once an hour if I run AGP at 8X and everytime I update my catalysts I have to use SMARTGART to slow it down all over again. It doesn't remember across driver installations. WinXP SP2 can also be picky about your AGP drivers. After doing some Windows software updates, I've seen some people who had to reinstall their motherboard chipset drivers to get the AGP slot working properly again.

 

[chico64]

Itried the system restore but the system still crashes back to the desktop while playing games .I doubt it could be my hardware since it is only about a month and a half old and that pretty much includes everything.