GTA Vice City Crashes at Random

I recently got Vice City for the PC for Christmas and have been unable to get very far in it. It installs, loads, displays cutsceens, and does gameplay all fine, but after it's been running for ten minutes or so it crashes, restarting my computer.

My computer is running XP, has a 1.99 gigahertz processor, 500MB of Ram, and a ho-hum video card. I don't *think* it's a hardware problem since when it runs it does runs smoothly.

Playing the missions seems to aggrevate the problem. If I'm just driving around town stealing cars it will run for maybe 20 minutes before it crashes, if I try to do the missions it crashes much more quickly.

Has anyone experienced this error or have any insight as to what could be done about it?

-Stephen

 

If your whole computer restarts it would lead me to believe that maybe this is an overheating or hardware issue rather than the game itself.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, is there some way to test that theory? I'm loath to go to the trouble of getting a new fan or whatever if it turns out not to be heat after all. I've cleaned dust out from the air vents, pulled the machine
out from the wall to have open air on all sides and still it crashes.

Stephen