Need the "experts" help.

Hey guys.

A friend of mine is having trouble with his pc. But I cannot seem to find out what the problem is. His PC is stable, but every time he plays Counter Strike :Source. His PC crashes, It completely locks up and buzzes through his speakers. He has to restart his pc to get it up again.

It crashes on the map loading screen and now it crashes on the "test my system".

He has no problems with Battlefront II, And he has run te game smoothly in the past, This all started about 6 months ago, first only with the "office" map, then with every map.

I know its hardware forum, but I think thats his problem. Its there a way to test his memory or his psu? He's running an Sli set up with geforce 6800. Its an alienware build.

Looked everywhere on the web for a lead...any help is most appriciated.

XIPO

Okay.

Try re-installing his video drivers.

Then clean out the system physically.

Try running other games like Day of Defeat: Source...

If they work alright, delete CS:S's content.

Re-download it and try it again.

A game with missing/corrupted content shouldn't cause the system to restart like that.

That usually is caused by overloading your system or damage to it physically.

Try doing a system restore to the last time it worked properly.

And then, if it comes down to it, do a system recovery...

Ok, it literally freezes, really weird. It just stops on the loading screen and will not respond to anything (even ctrl-alt-delete) He has to power down.

I have convinced him to reinstall everything. He stores "important stuff" on an external drive, so bringing the system back to baseline should be easy.

So if it happens after we restart everything its hardware, if not its a (groan) software issue?

Here's his set-up

ASUS A8N-SLI N-FORCE 4 SLI REV. 2 MB MOTHERBOARD

EVGA NVIDIA GEFORCE 6800 GT 256 MB PCIE GRAPHICS PROCESSOR -

AMD ATHLON 64 x2 DUAL CORE 4200+ 2x512 KB CACHE 939-PIN DC PROCESSOR

-2.21 GHz 1.00 GB of RAM -ALIENWARE 512 MB DDR PC3200LL

BUMP , AGAIN