Ok Aaron and dan know this as a few other may have picked up. Brand new PC with an ATI HD 4870 graphics card by sapphire. MY OS IS a 64-bit. After numerous problems like not enough power and a very old catalyst driver the main prblems now boil down to one problem.

My computer is locking up and crashing 'in-game'

Times of crashs: random once after 4 hours once less than a minute after starting.

How it crashs: Green or blue vertical lines down the screen OR Screen duplicates squares of the picture and misaligns them creating a checkerboard effect OR a black screen with white dots. Also sound continues to a point then does a half a second loop of the last bit of sound. No abililty to alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del the system locks up and you have to restart.

Everquest 2 and hinterland have done this. Crysis suffered major framerate drops in the final sequence as i told john. I do not know if this is related but crysis never crashed. I haven't played spore long or recent enough to know if it crashes like this too.

Windows vista rarely come up with a fault or error search and from the one time i saw the results it said my graphics card was the fault.

So any ideas that i could try to fix it? heard of it before? should i speak to ebuyer and ask them to test/replace it?

Any help is appreciated ^_^

I had those lockups very very frequently when I had the Catalyst 8.8 drivers. The sound kept looping over and over, or screaming at me when I had the headset on (quite nasty). After upgrading to the 8.9 drivers, I have had the error still, but a lot less.

If you are on the 8.9 drivers and you are frequently crashing in game, and you are also getting visual artifacts like green lines, checkerboarding etc. then I would say there is a fault with the graphics card and it would be worth applying for an RMA.

seveal times a day it appears o.0

All those time i left the group last night, bar once was crashes, the other one was my internet going ^_^.

RM? being what sorry for the computer people who ae new to computing o.0

RMA - Return merchandise authorization

Basically, return it and get a new one.