Games restarting computer

[Sita Atis]

when I installed Baldur's gate 2 and played it, it would restart my computer about.. every 15-30 minutes or so. The cd rom would just flash and my computer would restart all of a sudden.

Now that I installed vampire the masquerade, I started playing it but a minute in, the computer would restart itself.. so it's not just baldur's gate..

Why is this?

[Spatvark]

Is V: TM using your CD drive as well? I've had incidences on my computer before that CD-intensive-usage has caused my computer to just flake out, so it's possibly your drive that's doing it.

[Killy]

Since it is summer, it could be your computer overheating. Ive had the same problem, my computer was unusable when it was too hot. To find out if it is overheating, use your computer on rainy days/early morning. That was only then that my computer didnt overheat.

[crono_logical]

I'd probably also say it's due to overheating, and likly to be the graphics card too. Maybe dust it off, make sur it's fan is working if it has one (the fan on my GFX is kaput :D ), or even see if running the PC with the case off and a big deskfan blowing onto the cards and motherboard helps - that method drops everything by around 10 C in my PC :p

[Yrkoon]

i think you may need a new power supply i had same problem the same time i bought plane scape torment a while back.

put your hand behind your psu fan eg behind top part of pc case (assuming your case is a tower one) and see if you feel any air getting sucked in and if you dont feel a decent amount getting sucked in by your psu fan thats the problem. your pc will probly be shutting down due to psu fan failure so the psu heats up to much and bamm it shuts down.

am i right in thinking your pc wont let you turn it back on as soon as it shuts down? if so its your psu :(

[crono_logical]

Power Supply would only be the problem if you've recently upgraded by getting a newer and more powerful graphics card or another HD or something that'll cause more power to be used.

And air should be blown out, and not sucked in, behind the Power Supply Unit at the rear of the PC case - you don't want hot air being blown into the PC when the fan's meant to help cool the thing down :p

[Sita Atis]

um.. it's Winter here and it was early in the morning that I played it. I'm not saying it does that for all games, so far just baldur's gate and vampire the masquerade. It's not overheating, just sometimes it seems like the computer restarts.. nothing else other than restarting. Planescape Torment worked fine for me, so does other games, my graphics card isn't dusty.

So any other ideas?

[eestlinc]

I had this problem on my old computer running Age of Empires 2. Once I got into a heavy battle and full system resources were needed, the computer simply restarted. My computer was barely capable of running the game, so I figure it just had more than it could handle and pooped out.

[crono_logical]

What OS you got? It might be blue screening then automatically rebooting before you see it so don't see the error message. If it's Win2k/XP, you could try right click My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > Settings, and untick Automatically restart, and see if that helps and actually gives an error message rather than reboot.

[Sita Atis]

My OS is Windows 98. My computer meets the system requirements of the games, especially baldur's gate 2 which was ages ago. I get blue screen errors lots of times, doesn't restart my computer.