most freezes and crashes are due to overheating of the video card or cpu

[sevenredseven]

The title says it all.

so you have updated all drivers and tweaked all settings?

beforce you consider reinstalling Windows from scratch:

open your computer case and let a ventilator blow air right into the case.

[Soulblighter]

*cough* the aida32 tool measures cpu and mobo temperature as well.

[Moe]

Or you could just buy a decent fan for about 15 bucks and get sufficient cooling power, you know. Not everybody has his PC set up so that only DoW and no other application he has ever run suddenly causes an overheat.
I also fail to see what updating drivers has to do with an overheating GPU?

[Nerevarine]

Yes yes very useful post. I have a Thermaltake case with 4 fans, the cpu is at 40oC idle, 50 full load, so is the gpu temp as measured by the Catalyst Control Center. The game still crashes. Whatever.