Ok so I am new here to Horizons. I've been trying to get on before my free 14 day trial expires. However, I've had a rough time with some weird crashes, so I need some major computer guru help. This crash thing may not be totally tied to Horizons, but I have noticed that it happens every time I try to patch the game. Any help you all could provide would be greatly appreciated!

First off, here is what I can remember about my hardware on my home computer:

ASUS A7N8X Deluze MB - using onboard sound
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (1.83 GHz) - never been overclocked at all
Maxtor 60 GB (I think) HD
Windows XP Pro
ATI Radeon 8500 64MB graphics card
512MB/1GB PC3200 Kingston RAM (wait... it's related to the problem possibly)
400 or 450 Watt Power Supply (forgot the brand) - new in 2004

Ok so here is the problem. For several weeks I've been getting these weird crashes. Some came while playing Star Wars Galaxies. Some came while my wife would be checking her e-mail or browsing the web. I'm not talking blue screen of death or exiting a program or even the screen locking up. I'm talking the program/computer freezes for a second, I hear the fan in the case going for a couple seconds, then bam! - the computer totally shuts off. Sometimes I can hit the power button to reboot right away, other times I have to physically unplug the power cord from the back of the computer and replug it to get it to boot. Sometimes, I have to wait several minutes for no apparent reason before it will allow me to power it up again.

My original self-diagnosis was a RAM problem. I had one 512 MB stick of PC3200 Samsung RAM at the time and I had noticed that it had failed a couple of power on self-test memory checks from time to time. I also downloaded MemTest and would try to let it run overnight, but every morning when I did the computer had crashed and shut itself off again.

So, I borrowed a friend's stick of 512MB PC2700 RAM and tested it. It seemed to work fine for over a week. So, I said OK must be the dumb RAM. So I bought two sticks of PC3200 512MB Kingston RAM and installed them in place of my friend's single RAM stick. The computer seemed to work fine for several days - no crashes.

Then I tried to install the game FreeWorld. During installation I got the same kind of stupid crash followed by a hard shut down of the computer. I rebooted and it seemed to work fine for me again... I was able to play FreeWorld for a few hours.

The computer didn't give me any more problems until I tried to installHorizons. While the Horizons patcher attempts to download and install the patch files (over 5000 of them!!) the computer again does the same crash/power off thing. It has crashed while attempting to patch each and every time I have run the patcher... so maybe 6-8 times now.

Two nights ago I tried patching Horizons again and it crashed same as the other times. After that I said screw it and tried playing another game - Ashen Empires (AE). 3 crashes while playing AE. So I decided to start playing with the RAM again. I moved the RAM to the #2 and #3 slots (rather than #1 and #2 where they had been before). Played a while then crash. I took the RAM out of #2 so was left with a 512MB stick in slot #3 and it seemed to do fine. Ok... making progress right? Maybe that one new stick had went bad right? So I ran MemTest on the one "good" stick all night (covered the RAM like 170 times over) with no errors.

Last night I tried patching Horizons yet again with the single stick that had appeared to be doing fine. Another crash. I said screw it again and played AE for an hour or two crash free. I ran MemTest again last night and it showed no errors this morning... computer was still up and running fine.

So what the heck is this computer's problem? What could be causing these brutalpower off crashes? I can't pinpoint it to a specific program since it has crashedwhile runningHorizons, Outlook, Internet Explorer, FreeWorld, Star Wars Galaxies, Ashen Empires, MemTest, etc. I don't know what to try next to diagnose this thing properly. Is there a more reliable way to test RAM - like do stores have devices that test them more accurately than MemTest?

Please help. This is really frustrating and is making my whole home computer time not fun at all. Thanks!