HELP ME PLEASE

[Tripod]

So I have been trying to get both empire and medieval 2 to work, and have suffered the same problem with both games. To keep my post specific I will only reference medieval 2, but keep in mind the exact same issue occurs with empire total war. I can get the game to begin properly but when I play in either the campaign map or battle map the game will randomly freeze. This freeze is an in game stop of my monitor cursor and all. I can still see whatever map I was looking at but cannot do anything other than that. I don't know if it means anything but right as the game freezes I hear a beep coming from my pc. I am not sure exactly whether the beep is coming from my speakers or my cpu itself. After the freeze has hit I am forced to manually restart my pc.
I installed the game no problem. I then updated with patch 1.2 then 1.3. I have been using a cd crack that I made sure is compatible with my current patch. I have tried playing with no patches, and many different cracks but still have my same problem. I have also made sure all of my drivers are up to date. Here are the specs for my pc so you all can know what I am working with.

Motherboard: Elitegroup GF8200A black series
Processor: AMD Athlon 7750 dual core 2.7 ghz.
Ram: 4gigs gskill ddr2
Video Card: Nvidia gforce 8800 GTX performance edition

I am running Vista 64-bit operating system

I figure I don't have to tell you my mouse, power supply and what not as I don't think they are relevant. I am stuck though. I have: uninstalled and reinstalled, updated all of my drivers, tried the game by itself and once for every patch, tried about 4 different cracks, tried lowering my graphics card settings, tried lowering my resolution, and tried lowering all visual settings in game. And because I have had the same problem with empire I have done it all twice. Even though I only have 2 other games at the moment, this freeze only happens with total war. I am running out of options. I would like to thank anyone who reads this long post in advance. I am very grateful for any questions or comments you all can give me to help try to fix this problem.

[Space Wolves]

cd Cracks..O_o

[Tripod]

I only have the one crack now, but I don't think it is a crack issue. The crack I have is good quality and popular.

[irishron]

Crack is the issue. Thread closed.