Constant crashing when I login

I just got a new PC built, which is WAY faster than my old P3 1ghz, with 512m PC133 RAM, and using a video card (Radeon 7200 64m) that isn't even supported by SL's client, but I did get it to work quite well, and never crashed on me (textures would mess up) as long as I used old ATI drivers from 6+ months ago.

I'm now using an Athlon XP 2200, 512megs DDR (single stick), and a GeForce FX 5200 video card. Every time I login, everything look fine (looks way better than before), everything works just fine, but in about 2 minutes, SL window closes and an error report program launches and sends some sort of error report log.

This repeats over and over and over, and it just isn't stable. Also I'm using Windows XP (pro) with service pack 2. Motherboard is an ASUS A7N8X-X. 40gb Maxtor EIDE drive, and a generic CD-ROM drive.

I don't have many other games installed, but GTA3 works just fine with no problems what so ever, so I don't know if it's a graphical problem, or problem with my RAM, or over heating, or what.

I don't have my PC overclocked, as a matter of fact it's UNDERCLOCKED since if I run it at "normal" speed it's not stable at all. It's supposed to be 133mhz with x10.5 and I just set the multiplyer to just x10.0 and everything works perfectly fine (except SL).

Any comments or help would be appreceated.

First, you're sure you have the latest video and motherboard drivers from nVidia, right? And uninstalling and reinstalling SL doesn't fix it?

If not, I suspect it's probably your RAM. What kind of RAM did you get? Was it no-name RAM, or was there actually a brand name? Also, what kind of power supply do you have? Do you have the make or model of PSU or case?

Yes the RAM is perhaps the one weirdest problems I'm having with this system as a whole. This system is just slapped together from parts from other PCs.

At this moment I'm using Kingston ValueRAM and the motherboard had been used together with this ram before, with out any problems. But with a diffrent CPU, case, PSU, drives, etc.

I've ran memtest 3.0 (the boot CD) and it has shown some problems during these tests. It's PC3200 ram, yet I'm only using a XP 2200+ which is clocked at 133mhz.

Powersupply is a 350watt called RAIDMAX (never heard of'em) Seems perfectly fine, and it's acctually overkill for this PC now since it only has 1 hard drive, once CDrom, one video card, and everything else is intergrated on the motherboard. Temptures for the CPU run about 100 F' (97' as it type this)which is quite chilly for an Athlon XP.

I have not installed the latest drivers from nvidia for the motherboard, just the ones I got off the CD that came with it, so I'll snag that real quick and see how it goes, since I see there are new ones since last friday. Video card has current drivers, which I had gotten saturday.

Well, the current motherboard drivers will help, but I'm curious about that PSU. Lately, Raidmax is an unusually sketchy brand, and while a 350W PSU should be delivering the wattage you require, the power quality might not be as good as you might hope for.

RAM's probably the easiest thing to switch, so you should probably try that. If it doesn't help, well... at least you have more RAM.

Kingston RAM should be pretty decent, but if it's showing you have memory errors, then yeah, it might be time to get some new DIMMs.

Personally, I'd try a better quality power supply. I'd go with Antec, Thermaltake or Enermax. Those brands are probably your best bets right now.

Right now I'm running stable, and I've been on SL for a couple hours with out it crashing. I had to clock down my CPU to about 1.6ghz by lowering the multiplier BIOS so that now the system appears as an old Athlon XP 1900+, and everything works just fine now.

As for the PSU, I'll try swapping it out with another one I have laying around, which is a more unknown name "LCT Technology Inc." which is also 350w, but it dosen't even have a on/off switch on it. But I've used it in the past, and it worked well.

I think the RAM is the main issue I'm having. extensive memory testing fails, or causes the mem test to crash. I don't have a CPU heating issue since I can still play other games and the CPU temps never get near dangerious levels, and do not crash. GTA3 runs beautifully, Tron 2.0 would crash at one particular part. I just dissconnected the old crappy CDROM I had slaved allong with the hard drive, thinking that might have caused some issue with them both being on the same IDE channel. Haven't noticed any differnace from that.

I'll try your PSU replacement idea. I do have an Antec PSU (in the antic case) that's running another PC. thanks!