and things went downhill from there

I've made a fair bit of progress in the game, but it's frustrating because it's a bit unstable. The problem is that it's not just the game that crashes - it brings down the whole system. Sometimes the computer simply does a spontaneous reboot in the middle of the game, other times it simply locks things up so badly that I have to do a cold reboot to recover.

I am guessing that it is an incompatibility with the video or audio (or a combination thereof).