An abrupt and extremly frustrating crashing problem.

forgive vagueness of specs:
CPU: Intel duel-core 3.0ghz
vid:Radeon HD 2900 series card
2 GB DDR3 memory
800gb seagate SATA harddrive
200gb old IDE drive from last computer
Windows XP SP3
(dual boots Vista)


Hello.

I'm not sure if this is the correct forums to ask for troubleshooting but that's because the overall vagueness of the problem

Yesterday, while loading up TF2(game), It abruptly crashed; video signal abruptly stopped, and sound looping until forced restart.
At first this was simply a minor inconvenience, i had thought my TF2 was acting up from all the HUD/configuration changes I have been doing recently so i gave it a simple reinstall.

Suddenly it crashes again, while i'm on the desktop. I restart it again, try windows updates, a videocard drivers update, but I simply wasn't fast enough as the crashes happen sooner then the previous one.
Booting vista up doesn't work, it'll crash before it finishes loading everytime.

So, the crashes start happening more and more frequently, some before i even select a version of windows to boot/ in BIOS/ while running memory tests.

At this point, the crash can happen right after the bios startup screen, where sometimes i can get extremely lucky and manage to slip into the windows xp desktop before it shortly crashes while loading the apps.

Any ideas how i could approach this problem intelligently without throwing lots of money at it?

CPU running at 49 C, MB at 34C.I can't check my videocard temp, but I'm sure that is not the problem

The motherboard is an ASUS p5e3 deluxe. hd is seagate barracuda 7200-RPM

if you want to know anything else i'll look it up.

I should also say that at this point, I can NOT get into my OS for anymore then 1 minute, while apps are loading, and that's if i'm lucky.

Yo, Proximon

I Decided to give it a completely new cleaning. I paid extra attention to cleaning the videocard which was much dirtier then i had anticipated, along with the CPU fan, which is a huge hulking thing with places to get dust in that a quick compressed-air can couldn't fix. I even borrowed some of my friends higher-quality thermal paste and all that stopped all the crashes

I feel like a huge noob now

An update,

My CPU temperature is now around 39 C (98.5 F) In BIOS, and the fan is going at 2265 RPM (which I'm guessing is a perfectly fine speed) And it'll still crash!

A more up to date diagnosis: after reducing the cpu temperature about 10C, i could get into my desktop and it worked out fine, I decided to try it on Fallout 3 on medium quality (I normally run it on ultra with max FPS), and it didn't crash at all through the whole thing. On Team-Fortress 2 though, It crashed within 1 minute of joining a game!. Then after that it would crash on boot again.

A couple questions for now: Even if it tells me the CPU fan speed is 2265 RPM, would my heatsink still be the problem? Also, Yesterday while monitoring the Temperature in Fanspeed, The program told me that the CPU temp was stable but it told me that my 2 cores were individually overheating, does that mean my CPU is still overheating, or perhaps my CPU is going bad?

Does anyone else think this might not be my CPU, could my video-card be doing this?

Some feedback would be great.