XP Blue screen when playing game. please help.

Hello. I'm an avid WOW (world of warcraft) junky and am experiencing problems with my laptop blue screening. I have an HP zx5000 running Windows XP. It crashed about a month ago and I got it back up with a recovery disc. Yesterday while I was playing wow the laptop blue screened on me. Rebooted, got back on the game, blue screen again after a few minutes....tried again and again (I said I was a WOW junky) and after 10 minutes or so at the most it will blue screen. I've also noticed the laptop restarting on its on right after it boots up. This also occurred once today when I tried to log on to WOW. Instead of WOW opening the laptop rebooted. But the blue screen is not limited only to the game. It will also blue screen when watching videos, such as on youtube. Is this a video card problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Exact steps in your instructions is also greatly appreciated.
TY!

The next time it happens, go to Start -> Run... and type in "eventvwr" without the quotes and hit enter. Look at the event log for System; the cause of the problem will most likely be in there as an Error entry (with a red X).

The issue is probably a corrupted device driver or a failing hardware component.

It would also help to know what operating system.

sorry. missed that.

ok thanks guys, I will do as you suggest.

ok i just had windows shut down while i was watching a video. The first error that event viewer shows is that my McAfee terminated unexpectedly. It doesnt seem to show what happened, only one of the results of what happened. ok,....much further down the list i see several occurrences of this: ERROR: Source DCOM; Event 10010; then when i double click that it reads "The server....... did not register with DCOM within the required timeout."

ok now it just blue screened while playing the game. event viewer shows 4 listings, none of them have a red X. The first is: eventlog-Microsoft Windows 5.01. 2600 Service Pack 2 Multiprocessor Free. The next is eventlog: The Event Log service was started. Next is Save Dump: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x00000050 (0x80000068, 0x00000000, 0x804e8b85, 0x00000000) A dump was saved ...... and finally Redbook: This drive has not been shown to support digital audio playback.

That last one sounds like a clue to me...lol.

What now?

more info: I did as suggested here: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-11184-0.html?forumID=47&threadID=163915&messageID=1679870

another problem and i get this: the imapi cd-burning com service service entered the stopped state. so i copied that into google and i got a page with someone else having a problem burning cds. I used Nero last week to burn some cds for the first time in several months. coulnd nero be causing this problem somehow?

wow dude, no need to duplicate topics by starting another thread. Just be patient and members will help as they get time.