Upgrade help - crashing

I read the debugging document ect, prob is i dont know what my motherboard is or where to dl drivers for motherboard and agp thing.

specs are:

Tiger Direct Systemax PC (bought from tigerdirect.com almost 2 years ago in july)
1.3ghz Athlon
256 mb ram
2 harddrives, a 15 gig and a 20 gig (20 gig has 11 gb free and 15 gig has 4gb free, SL installed on 20gig)
Geforce 4 mx 440 64mb AGP 8x
Windows xp home edition 2002
soundblaster live value
i think this is all

But in other games, if i have the graphics all way up, in all 3d games, it locks up after playing a lil while but when i lower all the settings i can play for hours, i played black hawk down official demo for 6 hours straight til it got choppy and rebooted.

it does the same thing EXCEPT it doesnt have a loud beep noise that doesnt stop when it locks up on SL. does on other games. lowered all the specs and still crashed lil bit after i get on SL.

I truely dont think reason i keep crashing has anything to do with the video card.. maybe its cause of my memory, i have 256 mb, it locks up and goes BEEEP and doesnt stop when it has to load all the textures in the apperance window. i might try to run windows update.

Your video card is overheating. SL is -very- 3d hardware intensive, even at the lowest settings. If at all possible you should upgrade to a non MX video card. Ti 4200 can be gotten for $150 or less. But your video card sounds new enough it might still be under warrenty, if you can convince them that its broken.

For any passersby reading this thread - gamers should avoid MX cards at ALL costs. They are severely gimped older generation cards, marked as new and sold cheaper. They are for people whose biggest game will be minesweeper or solitare, and maybe tetris. Ok that is an exageration, but I do not like the naming scheme of the cards. A Geforce 3 Ti200 will run -much- better than a Geforce4 mx.

didnt think about it getting to hot, this really sucks.

know what linden should do? make an offline apperance program, to change ur apperance and save it and when u log into linden it loads up.

Ama is right, you are overheating.

Warning: the below procedure could wreck your vid card! BUt if you're anything like me, then the following phrase applies.
"If it ain't broke, tweak it. If it is, bust out the Dremel"

If you are technically inclined, go buy a low profile good heatsink/fan combo. Carefully remove the existing heatsink/fan from the video chip and ditch the fan.
You can find thermo paste at any decent geek shop for a few bucks. Or you can do what I did and apply a thin film of thermo leaving the 4 corners of the vid chip exposed. Then put a drop of super glue on each corner and set the new heatsink on.
Now you have those pretty heatsinks left over, Ram em! Using the same above procedure, glue the heatsinks you pulled off the chip to the ram chips on your vid card. I had to get out my Dremel and cut em down to fit.

I also got just a plain metal strip about 6" long. Drilled 3 holes. One in one end to attach to the case where the mounting bracket is for your AGP and PCI cards and 2 on the other end the same width as 2 of the holes on a case fan. Twist the metal strip at a 90 degree angle just down from the single mounting hole you drilled. Attach a case fan to the other 2 holes and mount this in the first bracket closest to your vid card. I had to do the 2nd PCI slot due to clearance.

Note that this is severe modification but if youre able to do it, it GREATLY increases perfomance and overclockability of your vid card. Lock ups for me dont happen anymore.

Also about your Vid card drivers. I've tried all the Detonators up to the 2/6/03 release. All have problems with texture tearing and DX flashing. The latest one I can use thats stable and glitch free is 41.09. You can get em at www.guru3d.com under download.

thanks very much, i have my case open and a small fan blowing on it, its in the corner on the floor where its very cold so that might help it.. i am going to read up on overclocking it and buy some cooling kits for it. im not that technicly illiterate, just i never messed with vid cards i might buy some DDR ram too. 3 sticks of 512s.

and i was looking in my case, my sound card is in the pci slot next to it. and im sure its reflecting heat back at the vid card and its prolly why my sound gets messed up while playing SL all staticy not right.

yup, move that sound card to the other end of the board.

before you buy 3 sticks of 512, I'd make sure your 2 year old motherboard will be able to use em. I kinda doubt it.

If I were you... just my opinion... instead of the money for 3 sticks of 512, I'd buy another 256MB stick and use the rest to get a better vid card.

ya it can, well it can hold 2 512s i think, but if it cant hold 3 ill put it in my dads comp

Hmm, isn't the FX series supposed to hit the market real soon? Might want to wait until the 5800s are available, I imagine the older models will drop in price quite a bit when that happens. Although I seem to recall the FX series has a weird cooling system, which doesn't help Vanik much...

That reminds me, you said your comp is 2 years old? If you salvage the geforce card, you could probably buy a new computer with better all-around specs for under a $1000. Might not want/can afford a new computer, but with 256 megs of ram, two hds equal to 35 gigabytes, and a 1.3gigahertz processor (speaking of which, the new Barton series is out, although appears to be testing around the quality of a 2.8gigahertz p4), you could get all those upgraded for a reasonable price.

Heh, btw, you can go to display properties, go to settings, click on advanced, then click on the tab with your geforce card. On the left side of the screen, you should see a tab with settings like Device Selection, Color Correction, and Performance and Quality settings. Under Performance and Quality settings, you can manually change the settings for your geforce card, specifically antialiasing, and anisotropic filtering, which if tinkered with should help lower your overheating.

Heh, that vid card is the one thing he shouldn't salvage.

I would definatly recomend -not- getting 3 sticks of 512. For the following reasons:
- When you decide to upgrade the motherboard and chip in a year or less that ram will be useless.

- For the price of that ram you could buy 1 stick of 256 and a Ti4200, and still have a little left over.