Now don't quote me but having a ton of gaming experience and running the latest and greatest games on an older PC I think I may know what your problem stems from. I have had games in the past that would seem to start up then crash the computer and more often than not it was due to your monitor graphic setting being set too high.. This can be a pain to mess with due to all the re-starts.. This is under My computer on you start-up screen and go to control settings and mess with your resulution and try running in 16 bit color.
Another issue that I have run into in the past on graphic intensive applications is the simple fact that there is not enough ram left available for the game to draw on. Even if you close down the running programs to your lower right on your menu bar many applications continue to use RAM. I had a computer savy person tell me how to figure out how much of my RAM was being used unknowingly and to my surprise my computer was running 85% of RAM at all times. This number is supposed to be around 20% on the high side. Hopefully someone will read this latter suggestion and be able to walk you through the process of deleting auto-start up and RAM eating programs. I had 740 RAM and still ran into issues with running games. It is all in how it is used.

I know I tend to ramble but if you have updated all your drivers I think these 2 areas would be next easily addressed.

Haps
No day is too bad to be fixed by a nap