Hi everyone,
sorry to bore you all but I am having great trouble playing HL2, CS or CSS. On HL2 I can’t even start a game, the screen goes bright blue & then re-boots my PC!!
I wrote down some of the stuff that was on the blue error screen.
It began by stating, on the top of the page,

"A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer".
It then goes on about checking this & that, stuff I don’t really understand, but there was a line headed "Technical information" which went as follows.

***STOP: 0×0000008E (0xC000001D, 0xE3F937c7, 0xA75BD88C, 0×00000000).

On CS & CSS I can play for up to 1 minute before the whole thing locks up & I get a constant machine gun noise, weird. Eventually the machine re-boots its self.
In any event, on re-boot I get the following error messages,

http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/3…essagesrc5.png

I’ve tried playing with Firewall off & I’ve also turned the graphics down pretty low, but always get the same results.
PC spec as follows ;
AMD Athlon 2400+
XP Home SP3,
ATI Radeon 9600XT,
1.00GB Ram.

This only happens on Steam/Valve games.
All other games are fine & I do have the latest drivers installed.
Can play other games for hours with no probs at all.
Played HL2 about three years ago with no probs, but now I just can’t seem to get anywhere at all.
Can’t think what’s different from 3 years ago other than I didn’t have my 9600XT back then.

I also started HL2 in a window whilst running SpeedFan so I could see what was happening.
Opening screens were not a problem. It then went to ‘Start New Game’ & the CPU usage bar on SpeedFan went straight to 100%.
The the HL2 screen went black and I could see a ‘Loading’ progress bar. When this was running CPU usage was mostly around 22%. Once loaded the screen remained black but with HALF LIFE 2 written across it. CPU usage then went straight over to 100%, I then got the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ for about two seconds before my machine re-booted.
Fan temperatures were Fan1 43C, Fan2 53C & HDO 36C.

Have also verified GCF cache files, no difference,
sorry about the length of this post but ‘information is power’ as they say.
I’m sure you guys can help,
in anticipation,

Slime.