System freeze on startup, during games, and all over.

I am aware that this might not have anything to do with linux but it is the only reason I can think of for my computer to do this.

I have a pentium 4 2.0ghz 256mb RAM

Geforce2 MX 400

bla bla bla...

Anyhow I installed mandrake 9.2 not too long ago and it has been working fine together with WINXP for abou a month and a half.

However afew days ago I was playing MOHAA (Medal of honour allied assault) and it froze about 20 mins onto the game on WINXP.

Ever since then it has been freezing during the boot process, also sometimes if it actually makes it past the boot process and logs into windows it sometimes freezes there, and if it actually gets past that, it freezes as soon as I run the game, or any game for that matter. However it doesnt only freeze on games, I was reading an acrobat reader doc and it froze. I tseems to me like anything which uses alittle bit of memory from the vid card freezes.
Tried Changing the bios to optimal performance, nope dont help, I've been using this computer with the same hardware for over a year and have had no problems with it yet so I doubt it is the fan or any other peice of hardware in the PC.

Maybe a video card problem????
Would the vid card affect how the system boots?
Anyhow...

I hope somone can help me ASAP. If you need more specific info just ask.

 

oh pleaaaaaaaaase ppl its really important!!!

 

FFS WOULD SOMEONE HELP PLS I REALLY NEED 2 USE MY PC 2DAI!!!
I have so much work to do its not funny -please people

 

i would try and double the ram
check all fans are working
check temps and voltages
what size p/supply
boot in vga mode this will tell you if it is video driver or not
in msconfig
turn off all unneeded startups
in services tick to hide ms services box and turn off the rest.
ech time you start your comp turn one back on starting with a/v
when your comp crashes you will know which one it is that is causing the problem
this is a slow time consuming process but it should isolate the problem.