Mystery Blackout

[cobralibre]

So I run a personal recording studio from this computer and I was doing some pretty heavy tracking tonight with a friend. All was well, no problems, my buddy leaves and so I go to play a little of the new quake mod I downloaded. I close out of the recording program and go into quake and play for a bit. Blacks out, as if I had blown a fuse...everything just goes dark and quit. It wont start from the button so I have to unplug-replug then the start button again and it fires up and doesnt so much as give me an "inproper shutdown/scan disc" warning, just boots up.
Whatever. Maybe had a power surge..who knows, right.
I'm playing for about 15 minutes again and SAME THING. Im now worried I may be overheating or something similar. Am I over taxing my system...I know its ill advised to install too many programs on a studio machine but its all Ive got.
Any suggestions as to what to check out? Where to look under the hood?
My System is as follow:
ASUS MB
AMD 2000 XP
512 RAM
WIN XP

THANKS

 

[Dan O]

Your ASUS MB should have PC Health Monitoring ASIC. Power up the PC and get into BIOS Setup to check it.

 

[Duster340]

I had the same problem with my system and Battlefield 1942 and it just needed a new driver for my video card (ATI Radeon 9700 Pro). Same thing happened though, playing along fine then uncommanded reboot. Worth a look.

 

[Jeerajat]

Check ur event viewer in administrative tools than get back to me

 

[cobralibre]

Thanks you guys,
It doesnt say much. there's a few errors and warnings over the last few days but I think those have more to do w/some software. I had to save close out of Nuendo a few times due to hanging but on nuendo forums Ive found this to be not so uncommon. I may try that vid driver update though. It happened again last night and I uninstalled everything to do with quake out of irrational fear. I may re-install but that mod I was playing took 4 hours to download on a cable modem. My problems started the next day. hmmmmm