Alright, so I was doing some testing.. and with the game in windowed mode, it locked up, but before the computer rebooted I was able to still move the mouse around some. Interesting.

I want to try testing without sound but I cant find where to disable it in the game.. Can anyone help me out?

Quote from qoncept :

Alright, so I was doing some testing.. and with the game in windowed mode, it locked up, but before the computer rebooted I was able to still move the mouse around some. Interesting.

I want to try testing without sound but I cant find where to disable it in the game.. Can anyone help me out?

Disable the soundcard if you can. Anyway, first try the following:
Start, Run
type dxdiag, then enter
go to the audio section
drag the acceleration slider completely to the left. This sorts out problems with some chipsets, as I said in my previous post.
To disable the soundcard: either you do it from the control panel (hardware management or whatever it's called in English) disabling it in the OS (but I would recommend a more radical hardware disabling approach in this case, or the above method to see if Directx sound hardware acceleration is the cause), or you do it in the BIOS configuration if you have onboard sound, as previously mentioned by IHateBureacracy. On some mobos you have to disable it phisically moving a jumper. Refer to the manual of your motherboard.

albieg, I'll try that tonight.

jertje, with the catalyst software installed its doing the same thing still, BUT, today it did crash once and an error message popped up saying the system had recovered from a VPU error without rebooting. Any insight?

At this time it doesn't look like a sound card problem. First ensure you installed the latest stable drivers for your ATI. Second, if that doesn't help, try lowering down to 4X the AGP acceleration in the BIOS, and disable Fast Write. You may disable VPU recover too. There are plenty of discussions about these issues on the 'net.

You could also try to run a Program that closes all Programs and Applications that run in the background of Windows which could interfer with the Sim. It's called EnditAll2 and you can run it everytime before you start driving, you can also decide which Programs should be closed or not.

Quote from bryanviper :

I'm very spuprised nobody mentioned this.

Since its restarting its probably getting a BSOD but it restarts so fast you dont see it. If your running WinXP so this,

Right Click My computer>Properties>Advanced Tab>At The bottom under ''Startup Recovery" Click Settings> & in the middle of the window that just popped up UNCHECK Automatically restart.

So now next time it restarts it will stay at the BSOD and you can read the error and see whats causing the problem.

My guess is that its your video card Drivers. You said you have the latest ones so I would try getting a version before the latest ones that are out to see if that helps.

Keep me us updated,

Ciao

Why has nobody else mentioned this? If he can run prime95 for over 12 hours then the hardware is probably good. And since it only happens in 3D games I would say graphics drivers. A computer that reboots is usually blue-screening and you need to do as above because sometimes the BSOD can tell you what is causing the problem!!!

Good luck

Alright, I'm in the process of reinstalling Windows right now. I had a new SATA drive laying around and I was overdue for a reinstall anyway. Hopefully the new install will have fixed whatever the problem was. I also put a new 92mm exhaust fan in the back and moved the old 80mm fan to intake in the front. I'm not very optimistic, but I'll let you guys know later tonight. Thanks for all the ideas!

btw, I'm fairly certain I did set autorestart on BSOD to disabled at some point, but now its too late to check (or to matter, really).

Edit: Yeah, no luck still. I turned off autorestart and its still restarting and not giving me a BSOD. mykl is coming over with his video card for me to try out. Fingers crossed.

Mykl's video card cleared things up. I ordered a Geforce 7600GT, should be good to go next week.