Oh Goody, Reinstalling Windows

Argh! So I got a new Graphics Card yesterday. It's sort of a stop gap solution before I finally join the ranks of PCI-E and I was hoping it was going to fix the crash issues I have with Source based games. I followed the suggestions found on Valve's site with no luck, I figured maybe it was an issue with my old graphics card's memory. One upgrade later and the new graphics card with the recent driver from ATI's site installed later and I started Team Fortress 2 again. About 3 minutes later it crashed with the same issue. Damn!

Then hidden in the mists of the steam support site there was the fact that Games freeze when running on ASUS motherboards. Oh, I've got an Asus board, maybe that's been it all this time. What's the fix? Upgrade your BIOS? Right you are. Apart from a brief time spent trying to get DOS to work for the firmware tool (before realising it was the wrong firmware, glad I didn't try to flash that on) I upgraded it on Windows.

Everything seemed to go fine except when I went into Windows it just rebooted at the end of its load. Nothing logged or anything, it just constantly did that. I could get into Safe Mode and I could load a Ubuntu Live CD just fine so it didn't appear to be a borked BIOS. I figured I'd try restoring Windows from the disc. Bad move! That copied the files went to the now finding your devices bit and crashed out. Then it would go back in, try and find the devices and crash out. It would do this until I got suitably annoyed. Which wasn't that long after it started.

Next up was reinstalling Windows from scratch. That went fine, obviously whatever driver causing Windows to crash and burn wasn't there in the first place. Great! A fresh version of Windows with none of the patches, apps or games on. Time to start the patching and installing again! Yeay. I was on SP2 when I had finished for the evening. I installed the newest GC drivers and that caused the machine to crash (maybe that was the problem in the first place but strange it only happened after the motherboard was upgraded). Rolling back to an older version seemed to work fine, at least I hope it is.

After all that, 6 hours later with my evening gone, I started up Team Fortress 2.

It crashed.