In mid-February I bought a new computer. With the exception of a DVD-drive and my copy of Windows XP Pro, everything came new and shiny from NCIX. Because I didn't buy my OS from NCIX, they of course couldn't install all the various drivers and test my new rig. In hindsight, I probably should have bought my OS from them, just for the sake of testing.

After installing XP Pro, I installed the video drivers. It was at this point that my computer crashed every single time on a cold start. XP won't load to the desktop. Every single time I turn on my computer, I have to wait for it to crash and then hit the reset button... then it will boot up properly. That's not really how things should work.

Also, when I installed Call of Duty 4, it would be play like a slideshow. Now my rig isn't the fastest beast on the market but it's still screaming fast and more than enough for CoD 4. Despite this, I got far enough into the game that I would get to this one point and it would always crash... no exceptions (there's a software joke there). So now I couldn't even finish the game.

Fed up with this, I formatted my OS partition on the weekend and started from scratch. Every time I installed something, I would turn my computer off and then turn it back on. I finally found out what was causing the crashes. It was the video card driver.

It's great that I now know what's causing my problem but I've yet to find a solution. I've tried different versions of the driver and still no joy. I've flashed my motherboard BIOS and that didn't help either.

So I got a bit of a lemon on my hands. It needs a boot to the pants to just even turn on properly and when it does manage to stay on, it crashes often while playing games.

I've e-mailed NCIX, I wonder what they'll say.

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