Games not working = depression

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Don't have vast spare time for games and I do look forward for the ability to switch off with them. So when you install and it just doesn't work... Maybe you solve it eventually, maybe not, but it's the knowledge that every second you spend trying to fix it could instead be spent playing were it to work. That kills me.

(And if anyone knows why Bioshock jerks every second or so, despite running at 40FPS on a good system, I'd love to know)

Wireless network cards can cause games (or even the entire computer) to do periodic lag. (Running fine, running fine, LAG!, running fine,running fine, LAG!...)
But since you are only mentioning Bioshock, I won't think that's the problem.

Researching a bit, shows that it could also be due to RAM/Pagefile or graphic-card/drivers.
What are your computer specs?

EDIT: And operating system?

I used to play Fable 2 for days on end. Then i lent to a friend. I got it back, put it in the console, playing, playing, pop-up reads "this disc is unreadable". AAAAAARGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! !! !! !! !! !! !!

What type of errors are you getting and with what game specifically?

As with Bioshock jerking. It could be many things. Is the game updated fully?, You have enough RAM? 40 FPS isn't most solid number. Anything below 30 FPS can be seen as a little jumpy, Lag as well is possible. Try checking the official site of Bioshock. Should be some solution in support areas for some things.

I'm on Windows Vista, Core Duo 2 E4400, 2GB Ram, HD 4870.

I don't think it's a frame rate issue, as this jerk occurs uniformly about every half second and I've noticed the mouse on the menu screen also jerks at something approaching that rate.

Annoyingly I've run Bioshock fine on the same system, only with a Radeon X1950 instead. One would hope superior card would mean superior graphics (although actually it looks stunning, beyond this everpresent jerk). Anyway, tried installing the latest graphics driver, an error currently occurs in installation and now Bioshock won't even load!

Guess I'll download the driver again, see if I can get the game to load let alone work properly, if not then download some old drivers.

But you see what I mean, lots of effort whereas had things been different I'd just install and play. And since I can't be bothered really, maybe I'll just play FarCry 2 instead. Once I've fixed the now seemingly broken graphics driver

Try running Driver Cleaner Pro first, before installing the drivers.

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/deskt ... er_pro.cfm

Stop all 3rd party startup items in msconfig.

Did the problem go away? If yes, great. Leave those startup items disabled. Odds are that you don't need them anyway.

If not, the issue is either a bad driver, or insufficient system resources.

Resources:
With random jerking, the issue is usually not enough RAM, or a slow disk system if the game is constantly streaming the content from the disk. Open task manager, go to performace tab, let it run on the desktop, and open your game. Play for a bit, ALT TAB, look at the memory usage history graph in the task manager. Are you seeing the usage close to the max amout of RAM your system has? If yes, get more RAM! Also check to see if there's disk activity during gameplay. What kid of disk do you have? If IDE, it might be stuck in PIO mode.

Drivers:
If this is a bad driver issue, try disabling all non essential devices. Unplug all USB devices. (Use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse.) Open device manager and disable the modem, network card, sound card, bluetooth, basically the hardware which uses 3rd party drivers and isn't essential to the game running. Did the issue go away? Disable devices one at a time until you find the culprit; then seek out updated drivers for that device. If the issue is still present, then the problem is most likely your video drivers. This is pretty hard to test for and prove, unless you work at ATI or NVidia. So just update the video drivers to the latest and see if the issue goes away. If not, try older drivers, or borrow a different video card from a friend just to test.

broke the magnet on the dvd drive for my 360 just over a week ago now, waiting for a replacement to come through in the post.. ive downloaded and burnt like 10 new games in that time aswell