Ok as some of you know, I was having some stuttering issues with FS2004 and the PMDG 747. I was in the middle of doing some adjustments during a flight in FS2004 because I'm trying to fix the stuttering issue(See thread in Payware section titled, "why the frick...") Now I was about 3/4 of the way done with my experiment when in spot plane view mode, I go to rotate around the plane to see if there was still stuttering issues and the computer freezes, the audio freezes and then the computer shutsdown??

So I go to boot up and it wouldn't even boot passed the XP welcome screen. So after calming down and collecting myself together before I end up smashing this god forsaken thing I boot up the computer and it loads fine except for the pop up message, "Your computer has recovered from a serious error blah blah blah. So the things I was thinking about are:

1. The 250 GB hard drive is starting to go. (A brand new one)
2. The hard drive may have gotten overheated maybe and the puter decided to shutdown.
3. The puter itself experienced a brainfart and decided to shutdown
4. My 7600 GT is crap and the puter decided to shutdown
5. Maybe the hard drive is fine and I should do a reformat (If I do this, it will be the 2nd time in a month on a brand new fricken computer.)
6. Give up on PC games all together and just play console games because I never have any bad luck playing the playstation 2

Anyone else have any experiences with this?? Whats your guys take on this matter?

EDIT: Well I just found out why the computer didn't want to boot up. There are 3 fans on my system. One fan is at the back of the computer. 1 small fan on the motherboard and a medium sized fan setting on top of something. The bracket that is to hold that thing down was busted and was only being held on there by the wires that are coming out of it. There's some white gooy stuff on the bottom base of the fan that was also sort of holding it down to whatever the hell is underneath it. With the computer tipped on its side now I was able to latch one side of the fan onto the bracket but it still sitting on there freely because the otherside of the bracket is busted. Plugged everything back in and it boots up perfectly. Even tried to check and see if this was maybe causing the stuttering problem but its not part of the problem.

Bottom line is this is the last time I buy anything and I mean anything from Tigerdirect.com

Some of you may say, well return it.

My mistake was that this is a "Build to Order" machine and there is no refund. So all I can do is just gripe about it.

As long as I keep the computer on its side and not move it around while its on, I'm fine. lol.

The A64 has a thermal protection circuit that will not allow it to fry and shuts the processor and then the system down if overheat starts to occur. A year or so ago I had the clip break completely off a motherboard CPU bracket and the entire heat sink and fan fell off the processor. The system was in the middle of running FS9. I thought the CPU was fried for sure but after replacing the single retainer clip with a double type everything worked fine. That is when I researched and learned about the A64 being hard to burn up, unlike the Tbird Athlons and many Intels which will fry in less than a second.

Eno may very well be correct that the fan with the 'goo' is the CPU fan/heatsink and that must be installed correctly or overheat will cause everything from stutters, poor performance and crashes.

If that did come off I would do a complete remove, clean the goo off with alcohol on both the CPU and heatsink, then reistall the HSF CORRECTLY applying Arctic Silver thermal compound. If you have never done somethiong like that it would be wise to have a trained specialist do the work because that area is nothing to screw with if you do not know what you are doing.