64bit vista home premium and my current card is an NVIDIA Geforce GT120 (i know, don't laugh) up til now this system has worked fine for me

for SL, watching movies and anything else I wanted to do, but now I"m getting a lot of shutdowns which I am pretty sure is from overheating,

the whole system is about a year old- I have a big flatscreen monitor from westinghouse, operating, supposedly at 60 hertz if that matters

i cant' find any reference to a easy system of determining compatibility and what i know about computer hardware i could i could put on the

head of a pin, please help me out to figure this out

oh, ps, i have about 200 us to spend on a new card

are you getting shutdown only, or crashes and blue screens of death also? it would seem that a fan is failing or already has

but if the computer is shutting down normally, except that you are not telling it to do so, then it is a software problem perhaps a virus

it doesn't bluescreen

the computer shuts down completely and restarts and i get the "computer did not shut down properly" message when it boots up

i've tried everything i can think of, i'm thinking i may try a factory default recovery, rolling back to fresh out of teh box

I would suggest that you go to the BIOS setup utility as it might have a hardware monitor for the temperature and fans of your system

you can do the same in Windows for your hard disk using a SMART monitoring tool

that should at least help you determine if the problem is in software or hardware, then you can decide whether to restore the system

er, thanks for your advice but i don't have much idea how to do that...eeps!