Computer crashes on all games

[lefecious]

Hi all, I put together an emulator box for my dad and it keeps crashing. Sometimes it goes 15 minutes, sometimes it goes 90 minutes, but it always ends up freezing up. And when it freezes, it doesn't just freeze zsnes, it freezes the whole computer and you can't get into the task manager or anything. You have to hold down the power button and just shut it off.

It doesn't seem to matter which game he's playing. He mostly plays tetris attack, or some rpg that I've never heard of. But both of them freeze up.

This computer has windows xp, but no software other than the emulators. It doesn't go online or perform any functions other than emulation.

At first I thought it was a heating problem but I used arctic silver on the cpu and I removed the side of the case and have a household fan blowing right into the case whenever it is being used. Neither seems to have made any difference, so I now believe that heat is no longer the issue.

The mobo is Asus A7A266, it has 256MB of RAM, and the CPU is an AMD that's like 1GHz (sorry, I forget the exact model). Shouldn't this be good enough to run zsnes if the computer has no other programs running in the background?

[franpa]

ensure you have the latest drivers for his hardware, and update direct X.

[DeathRPG]

Which version/port of zsnes is he running? Because ZSNES DOS port causes several problems when you run it under a no-Windows 9x (95/98/ME) OS. Also if your father it's running the Windows port, make sure you have the lastest DirectX version installed, check if any background application is interrupting ZSNES or try to change the video settings or something to see if things gets better. If that doesn't work either, you can always use other emulators like SNES9x.

[Rashidi]

perhaps it may be, the Video Card ?

this is my experience: using ASUS V8420 Deluxe
i never had any freeze before, but after the GPU fan is down, after several minutes of any graphic intensive program, (sim-city mostly) the comp freezes...

anyway i change the video card & now no more freeze
my new video card doesn't even have a fan on its GPU, but i a lot cooler

cooling the main CPU sometime doesn't enough

[Deathlike2]

It helps to list what port and version you are using. Also, list what video card and driver version you as using as well.

On the other hand, it sounds like the system itself is relatively unstable, rather than ZSNES.