Sapphire Radeon 9100

[northernthangz]

I am having problems with games on my pc. My PC consists of: Maxtor 120 gig hd, 1 gig DDR Ram, Soyo Dragon Plus MB SY-K7V with intergrated lan & sound, Sapphire Radeon 9100, AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU, OS Windows XP Home.

When playing Maple Story it tends to crash with an error message that says "Error code : 5 (Access is denied). Also, sometimes when you play the game it just shuts off or the whole computer shuts down.

When playing the Sims 2 it also crashes a lot. It brings up an error message that says something along the lines of "The program has crashed, it will now be terminated."

Internet Explorer occasionally crashes and ask if you want to send an error report.

My other computer has Western Digital 40 gig hd, 256 ddr RAM, Soyo Dragon Plus MB SY-K7V with intergrated lan & sound, Gigabyte Radeon 7500, AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU. Everything runs fine on this computer.

I have tried reformatting my PC and download ATI driver from website instead of cd. Even tried ending processes running in the background.

Any ideas? Please help my daughter is driving me nuts complaining about this.

[Enderandrew]

Re: Sapphire Radeon 9100

You may have spyware and viruses on your computer.

Download a HOSTS file.
Download IE-SPYAD
Download Spybot Search and Destroy.
Download Lavasoft's Adaware 6.
Download Tuneup Utilities 2004.
If you're using Internet Explorer, download Maxthon or Firefox.

Install the above applications. With Spybot and Adaware, you want to update them.

Now, boot the computer in safe mode. It's more likely that fewer spyware programs and viruses will be running in safe mode.

Run a Spybot check. Make sure to click on the immunization tab and immunize against spyware. Also, open up the advanced options. In tools you can check for bad DHO's, and such. anything with a red X can and should be deleted. You can also add Spybot's entries to your HOSTS file automatically.

Run Adaware.

You probably just deleted a bunch of spyware. Now run Tuneup Utilities 2004. This progam is not free, but you'll have a 30 day trial. It will optimize your PC, check for conflicts, and clean up your registry after deleting all that junk. Tuneup Utilities 2004 will also check what's starting up in the background for you.

The hosts file will protect your computer from getting new spyware. Using Maxthon instead of Internet Explorer will block popups, and it will block spyware and the like from being installed on your computer.

Lastly, go to:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com

There is a free, on-line virus scan. It's pretty good.

Also, if you have Windows XP, make sure your firewall is enabled.

Now that your computer is clean, you may have other problems leading to crashes. You can be running out of memory. BlackViper.com has a guide that will show which services you disable in Windows to free up extra memory and improve system performance.

You also want to make sure you have the latest driver for your video card, and the latest patches for the games you are playing.