I've had this problem for a long time and with other games, but I'm hoping someone here might be able to help.

Many of my favorite games seem to totally lock up my computer at irregular intervals. They all do it the same - it could happen after 5 minutes or 2 hours, it could happen during any type of sequence, it totally freezes everything requiring a hard reboot. BGII, AoE(K), Starcraft, they all do it.

I've learned to save every minute or so, but it gets really annoying.

My hardware is:
Athlon 600 (K7 Pro MB)
Voodoo3 AGP
SB PCI
128Meg RAM

I've tried defragging, upgrading drivers, and reformatting (repartioning) HD. Nothing helps, in fact, upgrading Voodoo drivers made things worse so I went back to older one.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd like to hear them. I've thought of getting new graphics card but can't afford it at the moment. My computer doesn't have a flash BIOS, so I can't upgrade that easily.

Thank you

I'd suggest checking to see if there are newer video drivers than you are currently using. I know it made a big difference for my Radeon card.

a comptuer made in the last decade without a flash bios? unusual. all award bioses withing that time are, and so is every other brand ive ever seen. id check the manufacturers website and make sure if i was you. (if you were told this by anyone working for PC world id bet you they were wrong)

on to other things.

firstly - think back to when the problem first started nad try to remember what you changed about the machine around that time. frequently some seemingly innocent application or peripheral can de-stablise the whole system.

try scanning for viruses. try upgrading your cooling - although starcraft probably woudnt be crashing the computer in this case. double check every connection in the computer. dont just look at them, physicaly remove and clean each component in turn. (NB - CAREFULY!) .if your computer has been running hot for a prolonged period (and athlons tend to), the chip may have been physicaly damaged. switch out components with another machines and see if you can isolate what is breaking. have a look through the startup files and look for anything odd. re-install your os (and i woudnt recomend using anything lower than win98 these days). get an air duster and remove the dust from the motherboard. that stuff can in some cases conduct sufficient electricity to short the motherboard and crash the machine. also, if you have a lot of drives and other peripherals, your PSU may be insufficient to drive them all. this is especialy common with the rise of usb. it should be 300w minimum with an average setup, rising to 450w with a couple hard drives and a modern graphics card.

thats about everything that occurs to me off hand - and tends to cover most problems in any case.