C&C Generals Zero Hour "Fatal Error - Hardware"

Hey you knowlegable lot, my mate has Comand and Conquer Zero Hour his specs more than cover the minimum for the game ( i even upgraded his ram and graphics card from my spares scattered around)
he has Pentium P4 2.4Ghz, Nvidia FX5700, 512Mb Ram
No internet connection (i do all the updates for him through my pc on a regular basis ;networked
This is gonna be 2 questions :-
1) how come from a fresh install of the game it runs perfectly fine for a few days then all of a sudden if he exits the game it restarts his pc
Then if he trys to run the game again it comes up with a "standard" warning that a "FATAL ERROR" has occured and that the game cannot run due to hardware problems, "The cause of which could be an overheated component or you do not have enough ram in your system or another hardware related problem occured during the initialisation of this game"
I am completely baffled by this as his OS is up to date (win XP Home), he has DX9.0c, the latest game patch installed etc.. game.exe does cause an error in his applications log but the crap it says after doesnt make any sense to me and im not completely dumb with pc's.
2) i have EXACTLY the same HD as him, the Maxtor 6Y080L0 80 GB yet i have noticed that his seems to suffer terrible performance regarding reading and writing speed
for example we both have a dvd RW drive capable of reading normal cds at max of 48X so when we both installed the ZH game i expected at least both our pcs to finish at around the same time, however, my install of the game was done in a few minutes while is was taking absolutle AGES to even get through the "initialising the installer files" and even though his drive light was on continuously the game took at least 12-15 minutes to install, its even the same when he un-installs it, it takes ****ing AGES!!, mine takes litterally seconds you can see my specs in my public profile.
his HD has a bigger C: partition than mine, and he has no rubbish on his drive as he only wants it for games, there no viri, spayware on it its a perfectly clean and defragged system and compared to the technology in mine, its newer!!
please can anyone at all shed any lite on this problem, im willing to show you anything screen wise if you ask for it, il do whatever it takes (short of selling my body lol) to get this mofo working for him thankyou in advance

 

You posted at wrong place , it should bi at Game thread.

 

i had the same problem and i found out that i had a faulty stick of ram, it sounds like the same problem i had but its unlikely tho

mite be worth a try....

 

I wasnt sure where to post as its a part hardware question and part software one any more offers out there?

 

thankyou i will look into it i dont think i have any other ram i can try as his is ddr and the only other ram i have spare is SDRAM was your problem with the game or the system slowlessnessy thing lol i really appreciate any help on this as like i said im completely stummped!

 

its not the ram, maybe its just the entire lot, pile of extreme crap lol