Quote Originally Posted by Psychonaut View Post
Ok. Here's the solution. Your laptop runs XP or Vista yes? That means it is not optimised to run more than 2GB of RAM/Virtual Memory. What's happening is the games are maxing out your memory and trying to constantly manage the paging of your RAM to Virtual Memory, causing it to over-work and over-heat. Which in-turn causes your PC to shut itself down so as to avoid internal damage. Simple solution:

Part 1:
1. Download and install Explorer Suite CFF Explorer
2. Run it
3. Click open and find the .exe file related to your game
4. A screen will appear with a list of headings down the left side, click "File Header"
5. On the right a bunch of values will appear, look for the row "Characteristics" and press the "click here" box
6. A window will appear with a bunch of tick boxes, look for the one "App can handle >2gb address space" and tick it, click 'ok'
7. Save and close

Part 2:
1. Go to command prompt
2. Type: BCDEDIT /set IncreaseUserVA 3072, click enter
3. Close

And you'll be good to go.
A couple points...
-Telling the OS that an App can address more than 2GB of memory doesn't make it true.

-Making 3GBs of RAM addressable in a 32bit OS means that you're stealing memory addresses that are reserved by the kernel. If a device driver is expecting that space to be available and it isnt, you could be in for some serious stability issues. You may get away with it, but you should at least be aware of the possibility.

The real solution to the 2GB memory limit is a 64bit OS. Even still, if you're running 32bit games, they're not likely to see more than 2GB of RAM regardless.