Games aren't working on my 8886

I haven't done any gaming yet on my fairly new 8886 and decided to give Max Payne and Madden 2003 a try for starters. Both games work great on my 750mhz desktop but have run into some hiccups getting them to work on the Sager for some reason. For instance, Max Payne plays but won't further advance past Part 1: The American Dream before shutting down inexplicably back to the desktop. Now with Madden 2003, it loads up but before going to the football field and actually playing the game I get a quick blue screen and then the whole system reboots itself. Upon reentering XP, I get a message saying: "Computer restarted after an unexpected shutdown. Microsoft windows detected possible device failure." Under that it says: "The driver for the display device was unable to complete a drawing operation. Please check with the device manufacturer." Also, I get a 2nd box that pops up and says: "The system has recovered from a serious error. A log of this error has been created." This rebooting has happened about 7 outa 10 times with Madden. It actually worked and played fine a few times but most of the time it just continues to reboot the system. The 2nd message that pops up that I mentioned previously regarding the "The system has recovered from a serious error" etc., I'm now getting that every single time I boot up in XP. Anyone know why games are't working for me and how to get rid of this error message that continues to rear its head every time upon entering XP "The system has recovered from a serious error log of this error has been created" I have tried both games with the drivers XP installs and the new 6218 ati drivers to no avail. I'm puzzled. Thanks in advance for the reply's.

Thanks for the quick reply's. Yes, I'll think thats what I'll do. Format and reinstall XP with SP1 this time and see if that helps. I did install the drivers from the book the first time and I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in device manager so I'm thinking I got that down right.