Computer freezes when playing

when ever i play guild wars after a few seconds it freezes for ages, come back for a bit and then freezes and ages again and sometimes it freezes in till it restarts the whole computer.

when it does this it doesn't just freeze the game but the whole computer but this only happens when i play games.

guild wars played fine for about a year and now it suddenly does this.

any ideas?

If it freezes the whole computer, then it sounds like a graphics card problem.

What have you changed in your system recently? Drivers? Hardware? Anything?

nope i was playing it fine for about 3 hours then it suddenly went like this. I tried reinstalling the driver but didn't make much difference. :S

what's your graphics card? Actually go ahead and list all your system specs, maybe it's something else, but it sounds like GPU trouble.

AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+ 2000 MHz 2.0GHz
1 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6200

Are you running any programs in the background? Have you updated any software in the last few hours?

im quite sure i haven't changed anything or used anything else diffrent in the background since it worked gd.

i have tried it without running anything else and its still the same

What's running in the background?

umm the only things i use in the background would be... itunes, msn, gw team builder, firefox and ventrillo.

When is the last time you dusted?

Your computer could be over-heating, I suggest that you dust it out if you haven't already.

You said ''This only happens when I play ''games'' so that suggests that this happens in every game you play, so maybe give it a dust out, and perhaps you can check the temperatures with HWmonitor off of www.cpuid.com, if you download that and post your temperatures while Guild Wars is up say, that'd help.

When was the last time you ran a virus scan? You may have gotten a virus, which is overloading your CPU when a game is running.

It's not impossible that one of these things could be slowing down your computer as well. I'd also try running without all these things and see if the problem occurs with Guild Wars running by itself.

I'd also take the others' advice about checking for overheating, excess dust, etc. The trick with these sorts of issues is to eliminate as many variables as possible. At the point where you're sure it's no longer a software issue, then you can start looking at possible cases of hardware failure.

ok thanks everyone im gonna try all these things and see how it goes.

I agree, I know for one that Itunes didn't like running at the same time as Guild Wars for me on my old computer, but experiences vary of course.

I can assure you that Firefox and Ventrillo don't affect GW - depending upon the bandwidth of your internet, they could cause lag, but they won't make it freeze up. (I run Firefox and Ventrilo when playing and tried various combinations in the past while trying to fix the lock-up-with-repeated-sound thing.)

I'd have to go with Brianna on this one - get the dust out and make sure that any and all fans are working fully - that could include CPU, video card, mobo chipset, power supply, and case fan(s). Since it happens mostly when you play games, the heatsink/fan on the video card is the prime suspect, but it could be any of the others as well.

i am also experiencing some nasty lag i have had open the task manager a lot lately and i have noticed that guild wars goes from responding to not responding pretty much every 25 seconds is there anything i could do..... or that is causing this?

The lag seems to be a general internet thing lately. I was playing TFC (FPS) last night and the lag was terrible.

well i have tried all those things and its still the same...

i dont rearly know what to do anymore

its pretty......ridiculous