Welcome to Gaia! ::

I've been noticing lately that everytime I play Stepmania on my new computer, after about 5-10 minutes of playing, my computer reboots itself. Windows doesn't shut down or anything, the screen just goes black and boots up. It only does this with Stepmania, though. Does anyone happen to know why?

The only explanation I can think of would be because I'm running it off of my external hard drive (my internal's running low on space, and doesn't have much to begin with. gonk ), but I've never heard of other people having that problem.

Really irritating, though. I just lost a really good simfile I was working on thanks to that.

Either software confliction or hardware problems.

1. You could have programs which Stepmania can be interfering with.
Go over the most recent installations (including Stepmania) and see if any of these programs are attempting to take resources during game play or possibly important files can be crossed during usage. Take a lot at this first since this is the simplest problem to solve.

2. You mentioned that you play Stepmania on an external drive. Check to make sure that the drivers for the drive are up to date as older versions can cause problems with newer operating systems (my dsl modem is outdated and can cause my computer to crash if the drive wasn't loaded properly in boot up).

I wonder if the fact that you're using an external drive for Stepmania might be putting too much pressure on the system. You have a hard drive which is almost loaded to the brim which leads to performance issues already (consider burning stuff off), and an external drive which in all practicality isn't supposed to be used to run programs off of unless restoring a backup. My advise here would be to stop using Stepmania on the external drive and find a way to play it on the internal drive. Delete songs and background movies, burn mp3s to cd. etc.

Damn dude. I can only C that probobly. Depends if I have the energy and if my wrists don't cramp up.