well it used to be stable...

hey, i have my overclock in my sig, in case ya can't read there, xp 1600+ running on what used to be a 175mhz bus. well, i started experiencing crashes and restarts while gaming, so i knocked the fsb down one mhz, and all seemed fine...but then fifa2002 started giving me troubles, as it would crash to the desktop...and it was the only game that would crash, so i knocked the fsb down to 170, played it for about an hour, and no problems. well, the weird thing is that it used to work at 175 mhz fsb, but it crashed at 174....so am i suddenly overheating or something? could it be dust or the summertime? and the game isn't artifacting, so what would be the likely culprit, northbride, cpu, memory, hard drive? thanks.

probably dust, or the ambient temps.

i second the dust theory, when i took my old fan of the thermalengine, boy the amount of dust gathered between the heat sink and fan was about a few mm thicks, and good clean and then the system ran 1-2 degrees cooler...

there i was thinkin the cpu had had its day

what do you guys recommend i do to clean it? i heard compressed air works well?

Just dig it all out and run a Q-tip (or whatever you like) with some alchohol on it.

That easy.

compressed air works good
and you should clean it regularly