Strange sudden rebooting problem...

[aneurysm]

Here's the specs:

Asus A7M266 (latest bios)
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.2ghz
Visiontek GeForce3 Ti200 (29.42 Detonators)
256MB Crucial DDR SDRAM
300W Power Supply
60GB IBM HD
Windows XP Professional

Basically, my computer crashes when playing Warcraft III. It's entirely random how soon into the game it will happen, but it tends to crash faster in multiplayer. It's only happened in Warcraft III, not in other applications or other games (Tribes 2, Half-Life, Jedi Knight 2)

When it crashes, it isn't a lock-up or BSOD - it's a beep and a hard reboot. And it's not XP's "Ooh, I'll reboot to avoid a blue screen!" feature, I turned that off long ago, and I've double-checked to make sure it was still off.

The sudden reboot lends me to believe it'd be a hardware problem, but I can't figure out why it would ONLY happen in Warcraft. My computer appears perfectly stable otherwise.

I've checked temperature. It took me far too long to think of this, but I checked it and it was a little higher than I'd have liked, but nothing to cause crashes. Reapplied the heatsink anyway, my CPU is now 46C, and the case is 24C (pretty much room temperature). I've tabbed out of WC3 to check temperature, and loaded up MBM immediately after a crash, and the highest I've seen is 51C.

Tried a couple video card drivers, and toned down the graphics settings, and that did nothing. I've also run Sandra (burn-in tests) to see if I can find a problem outside of WC3, and nothing happened...tests on the processor and RAM, mostly.

So, anyone have any ideas what may be wrong? Or is probably just a problem with the game that leaves me SOL?

 

[trenchfoot]

could be lots of reasons all the way from a bios setting that the game doesn't agree with to a game install that didn't set up quite right. if you didn't, how 'bout trying a uninstall, then regedit out game entries/ regclean/ scandisk/ defrag/ re-install/ reboot twice/ disable all background app's and run the game again. that should eliminate alot of reasons why that particular game misbehaves and not the others. i don't play that game, so i'm just guessing, but does it require more resources (ram, graphics, cpu speed, net speed, etc.) than your other games? hope this helps.

 

[DaiShan]

I agree with tweaker about re-installing the application, but just for kicks, which version of direct x are you running? Have you tried running dxdiag to see if that turns up anything? Also I would upgrade to the latest version of Direct X.

 

[Salian]

well i have had the same kind of problem, except my problem WAS related to WinXP's BSods. my mobo, memory, power supply and cpu are all the exact same as yours, with a gainward geforce3 original as my video card. only way i could beat it was to say screw winxp and go back to 98 :\ not the best solution, but at least i can finally enjoy warcraft 3 without crashes all over the place

 

[KGB]

What does Event Viewer in XP indicate?
Any clues?