Mystery Blackout

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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