Hi, i just purchased a new video card, radeon 9550 AGP. I took out my other card, installed the new one, and booted up. Everything was fine, until i started playing Quake 3. I put all the settings on high, and after about 15 minutes, the computer rebooted, right in the middle of my game. When it restarted, it tried to boot into windows, but it wasn't able to, so this brought me to the screen with bootup options - safe mode with or without networking, loading last good config, or starting windows normally - none of these were able to boot up into windows. It kept restarting the computer after the first loading screen came up, the black one with the Windows XP logo on it. I turned the computer off in the back, turned it back on, booted up and it worked fine. I was able to play quake 3 for another 15 minutes, when it did the same thing, just restarted in the middle of my game, and kept looping. And now i just turned it off in the front this time, turned it back on, and it's fine again. It's been on for much longer without the game running. I really want this card to work well in my computer, so any advice or help is much appreciated

Thanks for your time, Vor

P.S. my email is evilvor[at]hotmail.com, just in case

Welcome to PCGuide.

The web crawlers will love your email addy being out in the open like that.

To your question--we'll need to know more about your system, mobo, RAM, CPU etc--but the short list is your system is breaking down running at those "high settings" for the video. Try rollling them back a bit and see what happens.

Weclome vor, just a word of advice, never post your e-mail address on the web! You'll get lots of "lovely" spam. The mods will probable edit it soon so that it's no longer in your post. Just a word of warning.

Sorry, i've never posted one of these things before, so i figured it wasn't a big deal about posting my email, i wasn't thinking. I appreciate the advice guys.

Vor

Are there any type of drivers that need to be installed with a new vid card for it to run properly?

A question just came to mind about posting your email on the forum. I noticed that in the first post (which may have been edited already) the email addy was example[at]hotmail.com. By entering the [at] instead of @, does that deter web-crawlers? Just a 'didja-know' kinda thing

The email address had been edited. The answer to your question is yes. Crawlers are looking for hyperlinks, whether it is an email address or another hyperlink on the web page. If it is formatted differently (in this case using the word at versus the standard @ symbol), then the crawler cannot identify it.

If that new video card is a lot more powerful than the old one, heat could be your problem since it works well for awhile. Try putting a fan on your computer so it can cool it and help it breath easier. There are some programs that watch the temperatures in your computer but I have found that these really don't tell you much.

Also if you did some other upgrades since you bought the computer, you may need to upgrade to a more powerful power supply