irritating crashes

Hi. Recently I've been experiencing crashes on my pc when playing the latest games (especially F.E.A.R and black and white 2). At some point while playing, the screen flashes up a garbled image (looks a little bit like a magic eye picture or something) then my pc restarts.

 I'm running a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+ with an ASUSTeK Computer Inc K8V-MX motherboard, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT and two sticks of 512mb ram, along with the latest drivers for the graphics card and soundcard.

If it's any help, the problem was allieviated slightly by having a fan blowing into my pc, and the crashes can be delayed by lowering the settings on the games. Is anyone a bad enough dude to help me out?

check your event log in the control panel. I'm fairly sure it writes before the crash or whatever's going on to make it crash. Just an idea.

The fan thing is probably just in your head. Your issue is drivers. Drivers suck, period, unless you reach some sort of perfect equilibrium between components, driver version, Windows version, and game version. Have you updated them lately? Updates break things. So does not updating. Do both.

I'm reasonable sure it's not to do with the game version, because the crash is common to all games I play given enough time. I have no idea what the event log is or how to look at it but I'm looking into it.

I'll check the other things you metioned now and report back on their sucess.

Sound like overheating problems: Does not crash reproducibly on a special event (starting a specific programm, performing some specific task), alleviated by fan blowing into PC. Check the heat sink on the GForce, CPU and mobo. Check all fans, see if they are running correctly. If in doubt, replace fans. Make sure ventilation is OK (blocked exhaust/intakes ?).
If this doesn't help, drivers might be at fault (see #2). PCs are the shit for gaming. Get a console.

Well, I kinda like pc gaming, so I'll stick with it for the moment. Thanks for the advice thusfar, I'll check the driver issue tonight, and the rest when I can.