Weird crashing. PLEASE HELP!!!

Basically, here's the story:

I reformatted my machine a few weeks ago in the wake of getting a new motherboard and processor. Everything seemed fine and worked nicely. I then invested in a wireless network cable router so I could access the web in my room upstairs. The router came bundled with a USB wireless network adapter which I then decided to use as well. Running the internet was fine. No problems there. I then started gaming again.

I started to play World of Warcraft and with no problems. I then downloaded and started to play the new Command and Conquer 3 demo but kept on getting a weird crash after a little while of playing. Basically, the machine would crash (become unresponsive) and the monitor would stop receiving a signal and go black. The same thing happened when I was playing Unreal Tournament 2004 last night. Also, after the crash I would restart the machine and everything seems to be fine except the USB wireless network adapter would stop working, thus I wouldn't be able to connect to the router and thus the internet. On further investigation, I would go into the hardware devices section of the control panel and the USB adapter would be listed as 'unable to turn on' or 'unable to start' or something like that. I would have to uninstall the device and reinstall the software to get it to work again. This whole crash, reinstall business has happened a couple of times so I thought I best came and ask for advice here.

So, to recap, it seems that graphically intensive games are crashing my computer and causing the USB adapter to stop working.

Is anyone able to help? Do you think it’s a hardware conflict?

Thanks.

The rig:
Core 2 Duo E6600
ASRock 775Dual-VSTA
1x512MB DDR + 1x1GHz DDR
160GB HD
Leadtek Geforce A7600 GT AGP
Enermax 350W
Netgear Rangemax WPN824 Router
Netgear Rangemax Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter WPN111

You might want to try a better PSU.

I have had a USB wireless adapter severely slow down my computers, so it might be that, or it could be your PSU is not able to handle the spike when your computer starts to do allot of heavy graphics, and the wireless adapter probably doesn't help.

IT workz it dosen't work so on and so forth.makez me think that there might
be a bios conflict somewhere,maybe a possible ?? psu outage,you need to do a power assesment of your system to see if it is drawing tooo much jiuce..
AMD used ?? to have a "builders guide for desktop/tower systems" for calculating system power consumption or maybe a google will work???
Best of Luck....)

I think, it's your PSU like some earlier replier posted. you see, even the most efficient PSU have efficiency of about 87%. So if your PSU has 80% efficiency, in order to supply 343W, it has to use 428.75W (more than your PSU could handle). So my suggestion is, try a better (higher wattage, high build quality, much higher amps esp. on 12V rail(s), preferably tier 1/ Z/ 2) PSU. Read this and this. Hope these helps, cheers and good luck

Edit: Well, if there's something/ all wrong, feel free to correct me as I might have missed something taught by the 'teachers' in my Forumz 'class'

That card doesnt have much juice. Go to the PSU 101 sticky in this section and read up in the Reference list section.

My favorites are the Corsair HX520 and the Seasonic S12 550w.

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/har [...] 98276.html

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/har [...] 22154.html

Look at PSUs from Corsair, FSP, Seasonic, OCZ, Silverstone, Enermax, Hiper, Tagan, and Thermaltake: with 34amps or more.

good luck choosing

Damn, I was hoping it was just the PSU and a simple upgrade would get rid of the problem. If you think my PSU is acutally ok, I'm back to square one! Oh well. At least I don't have to fork out for a new PSU just yet.

I'm not acutally at the computer in question at the moment but will have a look this evening and post the specs you've asked for.

Thanks for the reply.