I'm baaaaaaaaack.

Alas, my problem has returned. And, I think gore was right on the money.

So sicne my last post, I tried a clean uninstall of the video driver then downloaded and installed the then-latest version (190.38), and that seemed to have done the trick, but I had stopped playing PC games for a few months, so I hadn't really tested it thoroughly at that point.

Then recently, picked up Sims 3. I've been playing it for a week with no problems -- and I mean as in eight hours straight of gameplay. Not so much as a hiccup.

But tonight, familiar problems came back -- Now, it freezes (if not immediately) within less than five minutes of gameplay. Every time without fail. I started getting System Error Event 1003 and Event 108 in the event logs, which from what I've read, are indicative of the driver getting hung in an infinite loop.

So, I had been running driver version 190.38 for the 9800GT. Checked the Nvidia site, and 190.62 is out now, so I grabbed it. Completely uninstalled, rebooted, then installed the new version fresh. Rebooted again. Started up Sims 3, got past title screen, loaded save game -- immediate freeze. Then I uninstalled and installed the 190.38 version fresh, since that had been at least working for a while. That resolved the insta-freeze problem, but it went back to freezing every time after a couple of minutes.

But I think I finally figured out what the problem is -- I opened the case, used the compressed air, but noted in doing so there really wasn't much dust in the first place. Reset the video card and both RAM sticks, and noted they both felt a bit warm. So, once I plugged everything back in, I booted up and launched Sims 3 again, waited for it to freeze, then touched the video card -- it's HOT. I mean, really hot to the touch. But both case fan and CPU fan are running. However, when I just hold my hand within the box short of actually touching anything, it feels overall rather warm in there despite the fans. The front of the case outside, where the vents are, feels outright near-cold, ironically.

So...methinks I have a heating problem despite my little CoolerMaster case (linky in my above post if you want to see the specs for it).