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Originally Posted by Raptor1
What kind of GFX Card was that?
The only things that have ever "died" on my computer we're my 7 year old hard drive and some RAM i broke when i uh...accidentally... kicked my computer (and it was RDRAM too, damn expensive)
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An old Radeon 9800 Pro.
Now It wasn't Oblivion that caused it (wasn't even playing oblivion when it started acting up), but the symptoms were the same, frequent long pauses while playing (game play would continue in the background sound wise), then scrambled displays for everything (including booting, post screen not displaying correctly is a sure sign its a hardware problem). Changing out the video card with another solved the problem in my case and proved it was the previous video card going bad.
Something to always keep in mind with bleeding edge tech, is that it tends not to last as long as it tends to be much closer to the heat barrier (heat is what will slowly do in hardware), and the main victims are cpu, and gpu (the 2 main heat producers in a computer other then the power supply).
Some basic tips to keep your computer cool are to make sure its not in a warm room, not sitting in the sun, that its air flow is not obstructed (a lot of computer desks are realy badly designed for this and tend to trap exhausted heat which gets sucked back in), and that the air intakes are not near a heat source (like a radiator, or vent). Laptops should only ever be used on hard flat surfaces (do NOT use them on top of a bed or blanket or they will block off the air intake/outtake vents, I've known several people who have killed their laptops in this manner). Also its a good idea every couple of months to open up the case (not laptops I don't recommend taking apart a laptop unless you know exactly what your doing) and clean out the air intakes (particularly any ones close to the floor).
As for games, well a lot of the more modern graphic intensive games are very hard on graphics cards (oblivion, crysis, etc), and tend to have them running at maximum power (and maximum heat output). If the ventilation is insufficient then it can slowly burn out the video card (or cpu).