Help with new Novatech PC please

[alifry]

Hopefully someone can give me some advice or some much needed help. I about a week ago I bought a Novatech nForcer 3500 (AMD Athlon 64 3500 64 Bit Processor, 512MB PC3200 400Mhz DDR Ram, 250GB Serial ATA II HardDrive, nVidia 7600GT 256MB PCI-E Graphics Card) and I've had a few problems. The PC starts up fine, connects to the internet and allows the installation of progams but whenever I try to play Half Life 2 it crashes. Sometimes I get the blue screen with the stop error message but the last time I tried I got the following message:

The instruction at "0x241f94f7" referenced to memory at "0x0d8bf41c". The memory could not be "read".

I have already uninstalled and reinstalled the nVidia drivers to no effect. Does anyone know what could be wrong with my PC and what I should do about it?

Thanks for reading

[Taxation]

What settings are you running the game on?
have you still only got the 512 mb RAM?
is your 7600gt overclocked?

[alifry]

1024x768 res, all 3d hardware and graphics options either on low or off, PC unmodified with original 512mb RAM and graphics card not over clocked (I haven't altered it since it came out of the box).

The PC will play the game for a while and then crash, sometimes after a few mins, sometimes longer, no real pattern.

[Taxation]

how high are your temps at the moment??

[Nox]

have you patched up half life? (I assume there are patches for it)

Nox

[alifry]

It was in a shaded corner of a south facing room which reached about 30 degrees C for a couple of days but I quickly moved it into a much cooler north facing room when the temp soared last weekend.

Do you think it could have some kind of heat damage? I took the side panel off, as instructed in the manual and all the fans work.

In reply to Nox, I thought all patches for Half Life 2 were automatically downloaded by Steam. I'll have to check that out when I get home from work but thanks for the idea :D

[Nox]

pass, not actually played the game :D so put it in the 'non-mmorpg' category of manual everything.

Memory 'can be read' could be down to three things: drivers, not being installed/correctly/damaged, the program being badly written, or an actual memory problem, be it on the dimms, cpu cache memory, mobo or gfx card - could even be caused by bad blocks on the HD but you would normally get a slightly different message - bit of a broad scope really to try and resolve.

You don't have an old HD anywhere you can try a fresh install of XP on do you?

Nox

[alifry]

I was going to try uninstalling Half Life 2 and reinstalling it on an external HD and seeing if I still got the same problems.

So if I did that and had no resulting problems that would mean an internal HD problem (like bad regions or something) but if I still had the stop error crashing problem that would mean the fault would more likely be a CPU/motherboard/RAM problem, right? (If that makes sense)

[alifry]

After talking to an IT guy at work about the problems I've been having I managed to borrow a replacement 512mb DDR RAM card, replaced the two 256mb ram cards with the 512mb one and Half Life 2 ran without crashing. Hence I think the problem lies with faulty RAM that has been supplied with my PC.
The question now is will Novatech send me replacement RAM? And what is the procedure for this sort of thing?

Much thanks to Taxation and Nox for their time and effort.