CM 00/01--computer overheating or bug?

[vbm95u2]

I'm still using the 3.81 version of CM 00/01. Since upgrading to an Athlon XP 1700 I've had difficulty saving my game. At some point close the time the computer is done saving the game the computer crashed and reboots. This happens only intermittently (i.e. sometimes the game does save, sometimes it doesn't). When the game crashes I basically lose the saved game data (it's corrupted). This has forced me to save the game twice every time I save in order that I'll have at least one file from which to pull my league. Needless to say this is getting frustrating. I try to save every wek so I don't lose too much of my league when the crash occurs. Last night I won two difficult Premier League matches with my upstart Wigan squad only to have to replay the two matches when the computer crashed.

The SIGAMES info board indicated that computer overheating is a common problem that can lead to crashes in Championship manager. I checked my computer temp after the last crash and didn't see anything out of the ordinary (around 40 degrees celsius). I'm running Windows 2000 and found an option that tells the computer to automatically reboot when there is an error in windows. I turned this option off a few days ago to see if the computer reboots anyway. It doesn't. Last night when the computer crashed I received this lengthy error message with some system info and this ominous sounding "system memory dump" message. This has me thinking that my problem is something other than the computer overheating, that my computer is having some difficulty with the large save file, though it is strange to me why the program crashes only occasionally. Or is there some compatibility bug with windows 2000? I am fearful that I'm going to have this same problem when CM 4 comes out.

So can anyone give me any suggestions? I'm downloading the 3.89 patch hoping this will help. Would any of these options be helpful:

(1) Save the game in a compressed format?

(2) Upgrade to the GDI patch (I can't see how this would be video card related)?

(3) Get more system memory? (I'm running with 256 Megs Ram)

(4) Some other option?