My computer turns itself off while playing agame

[Tboyd1953]

My Pc doesn't shut down completely. Everything shuts down but the power stays on.I have to Push the power button till it turns off then push it again to turn it back on. The only time this happens is when I play Ages of Empires II. I can do anything else and leave the pc on for days and it does not happen. It is a DELL Dimension 4600C.

 

[TegGhola]

Does the same thing happen when playing other full-screen games? If so, you may have a problem that only occurs when DirectX is demanding increased power from your processor and graphics card. Could be an overheating problem (maybe a fan died, or a heatsink came loose) or a power problem (possibly the PSU is dying of old age), or a RAM problem (sometimes RAM errors only show up when you use a machine intensively, and RAM corruption usually causes a total crash).

If other games (that are at least as graphically demanding as Age Of Empires II) do not cause a crash, then maybe the game just has a wild bug that causes a total crash. In which case, maybe try looking for a patch for the game to fix such bugs, or try newer or older drivers for your graphics card, to see whether that fixes the problem.

Hopefully it's a software problem rather than a hardware problem. Hardware problems require quite a lot of effort and possibly money to fix.