Game is hogging system memory

[Sti9]

Hey

Every game that used to work fine on my pc, and those that i just bought(anywhere from 1998 to 2004) have decided now to not work. i install and they either work for 2 seconds and freeze PC or dont work at all.

when i check my windows task manager- isee that whatever game is on, that its taking a large chunk of my system memory (anywhere from 91 through 200plus mb).

Heres my system:
asus a7n8x deluxe
512mb DDR
integrated sound, lan(3COm LAN, AC97 Sound)
dual Maxtor 5400rpm 60gb
hp9100 series CDRW
innuvision Tornado Ti4200 with 120mb DDR memory
Athalon XP 2000+
PC Power and Cooling 510watts


updated drivers also.

Why is my Inno3d Tornado Ti-4200 not doing its job ? all of these games have worked before fine. and i also recently formatted computer to see if that would fix it, but nope. and i updated all the drivers. (though these games worked fine when i had updated drivers before).

[ECA]

What OS?
How did you RECOVER your system?
AV software?
Utilities?(Norton?)
do you run a Bot program? For stopping Internet Tracking and such?

When Bios data comes up, Watch it... HIT PAUSE quickly, and look at it. Is ram being counted, and devices you Dont know?

Is Video driver installed correctly? check device manager...

[jfila]

Most games take up as much CPU performance as they possibly can. They are designed that way. Do you not want the games to perform at their best?

Did you install everything properly? Install Windows, then chipset drivers, then Windows update, then DirectX, then video drivers?

[jfila]

Ooops - I misread memory as processor. Not a bad system but those hard drives are your bottleneck.

[ECA]

re-installing can cause as many problems as Solve them. Esp, the onboard drivers for the controll of the Bus, and card slots.
there is one that must be installed on alot of boards, PCI-AGP bridge, and it should be on the CD with the board drivers.

[Sti9]

Thank you everyone for trying to help me out-

my OS is win xp pro

but before i go on, unfortunately, i didnt check the hardware side of this issue--only software part


The fan is not running, guess this explains a lot, including why my PC monitor goes dead right after i restart PC,

ill check the web for possible replacements assuming they dont cost too much

any further hints would be much appreciated

thank you