Q & A Section

Got a PC problem? Our resident troubleshooter Russell Barnes is here to help with all your hardware, software and gaming questions. This issue, Russell tackles games that freeze, PCs that make a racket and frame rate problems in Vista. And if you're considering a new PC or an upgrade, check out his advice to make sure you get the best for your money. Click here to read the Q & A section now!

Q & A section
I’ve got a bit of a strange intermittent problem in which the game I’m playing goes to a black screen and freezes for a while before kicking me out of the game back to the desktop. Oddly, the game will continue running in the background, minimised to the Taskbar. Although I can click back onto it and continue playing the same thing to happen a little while later. Any ideas on what could be causing this? I have an Athlon X2 4200+, 1GB PC3200 RAM and an ATI X1800XT all running on Vista Home Premium.

This is probably due to a combination of Vista’s infancy and incompatible applications, though there are other possibilities. My best guess is a background program or process is stealing focus away from your game and dumping you back to the desktop. The problem here is most current games and application weren’t written with Vista in mind and until said software is updated or patched quirky behaviour like this is only to be expected. Click here to continue reading the full Q & A section now!

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