Strange crashes

[Popeh]

Odd situation with my desktop PC.

After a fresh boot-up, it can work for days and days absolutely fine without shutting down. However, as soon as I load up a game that has some power demands such as FFXI, it reliably crashes/freezes after about 30 mins without fail.

Now the strange part is, once its done its crash thing, it does not crash again regardless of whats being run.

I can't think of a software situation that fits this, as a shut down and restart of a PC would not resolve anything corrupt.

The only thing I can possibly think of it a dry solder joint? But where to even start looking.

Any ideas or similar situations that were remedied?

Edit: Win XP

Cheers

[Olo401]

What video card do you have, and what's the wattage on your power supply?

[Gippo]

when it "crashes", i'd assume your not getting any bsod's. it just "freezing" windows?

In this "crash state" is windows truely locked up?, or does the application you're running just stop? How much ram do you have in your pc?

[Popeh]

Specs on the PC are pretty minimum (invested in decent laptop rather than upgrade desktop), but specs are below.

The entire system freezes and I have to manually hit the reset button, i've once had an error log but since that was 1/50+ times i'm putting it to an unrelated issue.

PSU replaced about 8 months ago - 600w.

OS: MS XP Pro SP3
CPU: AMD XP 3200+ 2.13GHz
RAM: 2GB 3200 DDR RAM
GFX: Nvidia GeForce 7600GS 256MB (AGP)
MB: MSI MS-7021

Re-emphasising this does not happen again after the first crash. After been shut down for a duration (overnight/day) I have to wait for 'the' crash before I can safely go into area's where D/C or crash wouldn't be ideal.

Cheers

Edit: I can't pin down when this started happening, but I do know no hardware changes were made when it started. Windows itself has also undergone a full repair.