hime

Exactly.

I realized I had a Radeon 7000 sitting around in an old box I'd decommissioned. I swapped out the cards and VNCed in (the old card has no DVI out and I couldn't find a cable). I couldn't make the box crash. I'm pretty sure it's the vid card at this point.

CPU temp 100 MB temp 82/84 Vcore - 1.44, 1.456, 1.472 3.3 - 2.912, 2.928, 2.944 5 - 4.972, 4.999 12 - 11.84, 11.776 multiple values mean it fluctuated while I was observing it...

Yeah, can't do that over VNC, so it'll have to wait until I'm home from work and playing Scrabble tonight.

The motherboard is a: ASUS A8V DELUXE Socket 939 VIA K8T800 Pro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail

Hmm, I wonder if the motherboard has some automagic settings it's using. It's an ASUS K8 something, and I remember some settings in the BIOS where it defaulted to trying to make things faster maybe? Maybe the processor fan is having issues as well. I dusted pretty thoroughly, though. blah.

I don't think the voltage has changed over the last couple years, and I don't overclock...

A couple days ago, I started having problems with video on my system. I sat down to watch Deadwood, maximized the window, and the computer locked. I rebooted and tried again and it worked. Then a day or so later, any time I tried opening a video (in WMP) and maximizing it, the computer would lock. This finally got to be a problem on Monday when I wanted to look at some porn. It's totally reproducible. I tried replacing the video driver with a newer one, and that bunged everything up. So I yanked all vid drivers and rebooted, it put in the latest driver (ATI Radeon 9600) and the system was working as normal. Still the video problem. Okay... twiddled the drivers some more. No luck. Reseated the card. Nope. Tried some stuff in safe mode, and got spicy and decided to try watching video there. Yup, worked fine. Maximize... no crash. It's running at 1024 by 768 in safe mode. I normally run at 1280 by 1024 in normal usage. Reboot my computer into normal mode, tweak the rez to 1024 by 768, and maximized video works fine. However, if I say, set the rez to something else, the computer may crash or lock, or it may crash or lock trying to switch back to 1280 by 1024. Oh yeah, video activity in Quicktime and Realplayer also causes problems, so it's not just WMP. My webcam program? No problem. Now I'm starting to get MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION blue screens during regular activity (not video watching) like reading email. I'm thinking it's the video card and that it should be replaced. I thought it might be the hard drive at first (all the disk activity when it tries to thumbnail the porn folder, followed by the maximize), but I've stressed the disk other ways and no dice. Details: Athlon 64 3000+ 1 gig of RAM (2 sticks) ATI Radeon 9600XT AGP Maxtor 250 gig SATA drive I dunno what else to rattle off here. I'm just looking at dropping about $100 in the next few days on a new Radeon 9550 and thought I would throw it up in front of people who are more current than I am. I gave up my IT job and am okay with that. Oh yeah, I'm figuring to buy another fan for the case (I only have two) and I did crack it open and thoroughly get the dust out of it and such and finally lifted it up off the floor. It's been running relatively smoothly since January 05...