Let me explain to you guys a problem that I have been having as of lately. I say lately because it hasn't happened before about a few weeks ago. A few weeks back I was playing Team Fortress 2, and the computer went into sleep mode or something and the monitor had a box on it that said no signal was going to it. I couldn't do anything but shut my computer off and restart it. I didn't feel like playing again until later, but it did it once more. Now today I was playing Half Life 2 and something a little bit different happens; my monitor goes black and shows the same box again, then it comes back. Once it comes back it freezes for a few seconds and the game minimizes and my ATI control center gives me some message about the accelerator reseting because of a problem with the drivers or something. I resume play and it freezes and I can not do anything except restart. I haven't really played many games that are somewhat modern lately besides TF2 and Half Life 2(which is kind of old but not real old). I have never had this happen before until about a month ago as I said, and I have played a lot of games that have worked fine such as F.E.A.R. and Prey, and many others that are semi modern. I play a lot of older games now that work great such as Quake 3, Commander Keen games, and others.

Sometimes when I would play TF2 it would seem to go into sleep mode or whatever, but moving the mouse and pressing the power button quickly were futile. I have 2 GB of ram and a x1900 GT GPU which is kind of old now but the games run great besides the random bouts of abruptly stopping. It might be a problem with my drivers but i'm not very astute with things like this. Help? Thanks!

EDIT: When I think about it, this is the exact reason I am not playing Left4Dead. This same kind of thing happened where the monitor would turn black and the game freezes. You might have even noticed my post in the L4D topic.

Ok...I uninstalled my drivers and restarted. Then I download the latest drivers for my card from the ATI website, then I went to play the game. I was actually able to play for a bit longer this time, but then the game freezes. This time it didn't go black, it just FREEZES and the sound skips and after a minute I turn it off. What's funny is that I can run the game at a great FPS until it abruptly STOPS - it's so damn annoying!

I hope I don't need a new GPU, so I am open for more suggestions if possible! Thanks.

Oh, and would opening the PC and blowing it out with dust remover be very effective? I looked at the airholes at the side of my PC and they were covered with dust. Thanks for any answers.