When I play Oblivion, usually after about 2-3 minutes my computer will freeze. This also happens when I play Guild Wars. Sometimes though, I can play for longer (like an hour) without my computer freezing. I'm pretty sure I have a decent setup:

AMD Athlon 2400+ about 2gHz
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128mb
Advance AC97 Audio (onboard)
768MB RAM

I have updated Direct X. I run the game at the 640 resolution and have adjusted in game video settings to low.

Could the problem be that I'm running out of system memory while playing Oblivion or Guildwars?

Thanks for any help

Tell me about it. It's about a 70% chance that my pc won't crash when I go through a door. thats lots of saves.

Writing a roleplaying diary, it seems about half of it will be taken up with... ' and then i blacked out'

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I think that you simply don't have a good enough computer to run Oblivion. I've read many reviews of Oblivion lately about system requirements and such, and I come across over and over again is how you can have recommended requirements for Oblivion but still won't be able to run the game. But in this case I really think you have to set down the graphics pretty low... About that GW also crashes, well you should try to delete all crap from you're harddrive and close all other programs then the game itself - Don't know about the system requirements for GW, but this is all I can come up with...

Are you sure your CPU fan is working?

The most common reason for freezes during 3D is overheating. Have you overclocked the CPU or the craphics card? If so try to lower it a bit.

I play with everything on max (1280x1024 which is max for my 19" LCD), with AA/AF set in ATI Control Center and HDR enabled in game, and have no problems what so ever.

I did however have some strange freezes and other problems with most games a few weeks ago. A BIOS upgrade fixed everything (have a brand new MB). Check and see if there a new BIOS available for your motherboard if it's been a while since you last checked.

I also notice that Oblivion uses quite a lot of memory like you suspect. I have 2 GB, and mem usage is 45-60 % while playing Oblivion (have a CPU/RAM usage indicator on my keyboard).

I'm not a hardware expert,but i think that 2Ghz AMD would burn out instantly if cooler would stop working.My old Pentium 1 133Mhz proc could work without cooler.But procs these days.....i think they would burn instantly (IMHO)

Are you sure your CPU fan is working?


Yes. My fan is working.

Not as long as they don't do much. An Athlon can take a suprising amount of punishment in that respect (speaking from personal experience here!) - that's why I asked in the first place

If that ain't it, and if the GPU temperature is in normal parameters as well, it's probably either a driver problem or a resource conflict. I heard a lot of people have problems with Creative cards. ISAT08, if you have one, you could try to disable the driver for the soundcard and see if it works then. You wouldn't have sound, but if it works then, at least you'd know what the problem was...

stargelman - I'll try that and let you know what happens.

Stargelman is on the right path. It sounds like overheating to me.

When it locks up IMMEDIATELY reset your computer and check if it says temperature.

If it is over 60 C then yeah, theres a problem. If its under it isnt CPU overheating.