I need some advice if you guys have the time to help me with a system question. I needed a new machine and my husband surprised me with one recently I'll give you the specs as I understand them.

Dual Core Intel 2.13
2 gigs DDR
with a 7900 GTX graphics card

I am having long pauses in game and after talking with Tuda updated to the latest drivers from Nvidia rather than using the latest from the manufacturer as the guy had installed. The new drivers helped with some of the problems I was having but did not stop the pausing which lasts quite a while in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 seconds. I got a couple of errors which said the NV4 display driver had stopped working normally and it would shut down the machine. When it came back up it would tell me the system had recovered from a serious error. We took the machine back to the guy who built it and I got it back yesterday. Still having the long pauses. He went back to the manufacturers drivers on the video card so I'll once again update those. What I'm wondering is what else I can check or tell him to check that may be causing the pauses.

If you have the time to give me some suggestions please give it to me in computer dummy speak as I'm not at all talented in this area. You guys always know more about these things than the people I deal with it seems and I'm about to pull my hair out....or perhaps pull his hair out ;). My daughter's older machine is having no problems at all, she has no pauses or any problem playing along side me so I know it's this set up that needs some help. Thank you so much for the patience you show me with these questions, I do appreciate it very much.

do you have nvidia firewall installed? (if you have nforce 4 mobo?)

The nvidia firewall drivers are horrible, I had crashes a ton when I had it installed I ended up reinstalling windows and when installing the nforce4 drivers not installing the firewall (you can probably just remove it but I wanted to make sure its gone)

what type of Power Supply (Watts) do you have?

I'd suggest at least a 450W for that machine,

Oh, I thought you meant split-second pauses, like choppy frames. Very long pauses like that, followed by an error, suggest a hardware problem.

If it's not happening when you first load the game, but a few minutes (or longer) into it, the card may be overheating. Your CPU may also be overheating, which might cause the same problem. A bad memory stick might also cause crashing.

At this point, you need a basic system diagnostic. First run Memtest (http://www.memtest.org/) on a bootable CD to rule out a memory issue. If that passes, run Prime95 (http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm) torture test to rule out a CPU issue, while monitoring CPU temperatures and making sure they don't exceed 60 C. If both pass, run 3DMark 2001SE (http://www.futuremark.com/download/3dmark2001/) for a while while monitoring the video card's temperature level (Nvidia control panel -> 3D settings -> Monitor temperature).

If it's a hardware issue, it will usually reveal itself in one of these three steps, and you will then have a better idea as to what area of the system is causing the trouble. If all three pass with no trouble, it's more likely to be a game-specific issue, which you can usually resolve by tinkering with drivers and game settings.

Thank you both very much for your help, I truly appreciate it.

adrone, I'm not sure if that firewall is installed. I know the machine is behind a firewall but I'll check to see if that is the one. I'll also check the power supply.

Tuda, thank you so much for all of those links. It will pause like that randomly, sometimes it seems there is a pause when I first enter but it's more like it's loading everything and then goes on but these long ones just happen at no specific interval (usually at exactly the wrong moment). This will give me some specifics to either check or be sure he checks and maybe we'll be able to find the cause. Many thanks once again :).

Is it all games or just some ?

I know EQ had a problem with dual core CPUs that requires a bit of software to get it to run using one core only.

Hello Fenlayen. We've had to be away from the computers for a few days and I've just seen your post. It's happening with WoW and another game, behaving the same way in each. Yesterday I was able to be in game for a while and it crashed with that error message 3 times in one hour and again later, plus the pauses were happening more often. I'm going to try to take it back to the guy who built it this afternoon or tomorrow and have him run all of the tests and checks that Tuda provided and hope that he'll find out what is wrong. Yesterday I sent the report to Microsoft and it came back to say that a driver in the system was causing a problem but they couldn't be more specific and would keep working on it or something like that, I'm sure you guys are more familiar with their auto responses.

Thanks again guys for the help, it's so frustrating to know so little about computers when a problem is going on like this and the people who should know can't seem to fix it. I appreciate your help more than you can know.