Some games crash XP home, some don't?

A while back I had a new HD fitted onto my machine and had XP Home put onto
that. So, the only thing different about my PC is the O/S.

Anyway, suffice to say, even after a lot of patching, defragging, virus
checking, updating and so on, a lot of my games started crashing to the
desktop. And I don't mean old games that aren't compatible with XP, either.
These are new games such as Hal-Life 2, Painkiller and Farcry.

I feel I should point out that other games seem to work fine, such as:
Diablo 2, Tombraider 2, Civ 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and Thief 1 and
2.

So what's going on? Most people seem to suggest overheating, but if that
were true why aren't the above games crashing? Also, why does Farcry crash
more or less instantly, whereas I can play Painkiller for a while and HL2
for even longer? Anyway, my CPU never goes above 60 (which I realise is a
bit on the high side, but it was no higher on Win98 - ON THE SAME PC!).

If it were something like bad RAM, then the above argument would still apply
(nothing crashed on 98).

By the way, let's get my sys-specs out of the way:

XP Home with all updates apart from SP2
AMD 2600
512 DDR 3200
2 HD's with gigs of space
SB Audigy 2 (latest drivers)
Radeon 9700 (latest drivers but have tried a lot of others)
MSI MB with all updates apart from BIOS (see below as to why)

Nothing is overclocked!

Yes, I suppose that updating the BIOS my help but IT'S THE SAME MB! Anyway,
I would only risk a 'disk' update and not a 'windows' one in case something
went wrong. Only I can't because my old internal FD was never recognised by
XP so I had to by an external USB one and that will only be recognised as
drive "B" not "A". S I haven't risked it, but I have tried the following
(after consulting lots of old posts:

Lowered AGP to 8
Put graphics to AGP
Turned of sys-restore
Nothing but essentials in background
Turned off virus checker

And quite a few other things!

One last bit of info I can give you are the temps and voltage of my system
(I use a utility from MSI to tell me this so I do not have to enter BIOS):

CPU temp: 53
Sys temp: 42
FSB: 167
Vcore: 1.650
Memory Voltage: 2.60
AGP voltage: 1.55
3.3C: 3.22
+5v: 4.97
+12v: 11.42

Lastly, my chip (2600): 167MHz x 12.5

I am posting this message to quite a few groups (not cross-posting) because
I really am at my wit's end now.

Thanks for any help

 

If your machine is a desktop, then the 9700 is quite an old GPU, the games
you seem to be having problems with are the latest, VERY demanding graphics
wise, and don't really work at the minimum spec stated on the box. The best
way to get these types of games working it to reduce the detail levels
within the game, maybe even operating at 16bit if it's an option. The auto
configure in many games will not provide stable settings.

Have you tried the OMEGA drivers? http://www.omegadrivers.net/

These are optimised for stability, so do not be tempted to adjust anything
unless you have a clear understanding of what you are doing.

**SS**