It seems like putting my video card in the oven and cooking it for a little while actually worked. I'm getting some artifacting in games, but my PC doesn't seem to be spitting out blue screens any more. I'll still probably upgrade my video card. Not sure how long this one will be hanging around long after all this crap.

I did as DarkGamer007 suggested and hunted around and managed to dig up a Geforce 7600GT. I'd forgotten how ridiculously big my 9800GTX is. Anyway, I managed to get my PC to boot normally with the 9800GTX and then picked Oblivion (because I knew the 7600GT could handle it) and booted it up. Played a few minutes before my PC crashed again. Then I switched out the 9800 for the 7600 and did tried Oblivion again. Played maybe 30-45 minutes, no crash. So yeah, I'm pretty certain it's my video card now.

I did some quick checking on Newegg and it seems like the Geforce 460GTX is the best deal on video cards under $200. Is that about right? Any other suggestions on that front?

Edit: Holy ****, and here I was thinking DJ8WORK was being a dick. The problem with doing that with the 9800 is the huge plastic cover over it. I'd have to figure out how to pry that off. Maybe I'll do that.

Was playing a game when my PC decided to show me a blue screen. Something like "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA". When I restarted my PC the fancy motherboard logo had all these little, weird artifacts all over it, and as my PC was booting up all these characters (mostly "$"s) appeared randomly all over the screen making everything absolutely incoherent. When it got to the "Would you like Windows 7 to boot in safemode?" screen the weird artifacts and crap disappeared, but everything looked kind of blurry. Safemode started up just fine, still oddly blurry, so I restarted my PC. And the same weird crap happened again. When I started it up normally the PC crashed again when it was supposed to show the login screen. I think that's because I run two monitors and when my video card tried to switch everything to the main one it couldn't handle it.

I ended up uninstalling my video drivers, scrubbing the registry, and reinstalling them. That seemed to work for about a day, but when I started my PC up this afternoon it happened again.

Is there anything other than my video card that could possibly be doing this? I'm pretty poor at the moment, so I'd rather not fork out money for one problem when it turns out that I had another.

Nvidia's video card drivers come equipped with a spiffy little thing call the Nvidia Control Panel. Now what this little panel does (among other things) is allow you to force certain settings to work with applications. Like enhancing or overwriting a game's AA or AF. I like these little tweaks and I get some good use out of them.

I'm going to be upgrading soon into the $200 range and the way I see it is that my two options are the Radeon HD 4850 and the Geforce 9800GTX. Do the ATI drivers have a feature similar to the Nvidia Control panel? Personally I'm pretty much a Nvidia fanboy, but despite the fact that the 4850 benchmarks lower there is the issue of the size of the 9800. I could fit it, it would just be a pain, so I want to gather all the little details before I make a decision.

Yeah, I'm another interested FPS gamer, and I'm truly intrigued by this game. What reviews I've read are absolutely shining, and it's getting massive amounts of "buy it or I'll kill you" from the community as well. I'm really itching for a demo or a trial or something.

I haven't really played anything that could be said to have slow pacing (some perhaps come close), but I would really like to try and expand my, ah, horizons where gaming in general is concerned.

The multiplayer sounds really intimidating though. Usually I'm playing CSS or UT or TF2 or etc. A single online game that can last for hours on end sounds somewhat disturbing (despite the save system), but then again I doubt I have anywhere nearing the appropriate skill set to take on most of the other players out there, nor are any of my gaming buddies really into these sort of games.

I still intend to try it out. Here's hoping for a demo.

My first place goes to R6 Vegas. I was pretty pissed when it ate **** on my E6750. There should be no way that a game that came out at the end of '06 wasn't optimized for dual-core.

My second place goes to Gothic 3. I knew it sucked before I bought it, but, by god, it SUCKED beyond my wildest dreams. The really sad thing is that Gothic 3 could have been a masterpiece. So sad...