problem

[Wudustan]

I do realise that this is posted in the wrong section, seeing as I would like support with a problem rather than just want a bit of banter, but the 'hl2 help section' was last visited september 7th so I don't think it gets much action. Still I do apologise.

Now can anyone help?
I'm running an Intel Quad Core Q6600,
3 gb of RAM
pny nvidia gt8800
on win xp service pack 3 (or two or w.e you wana call it)

i've only just started playing half life 2 cause i was an idiot and never tried it before, but my pc has had amazing difficulty running the thing. every couple of minutes (2-10 usually) the screen goes haywire- colours, textures everything goes corrupt and basically looks awful and impedes play. Also periodically (30 minutes to an hour) it likes to have an EPIC crash where my nv4 display driver reverts to 640x480 resolution and 16bit and says that its stuck in a loop and needs to reboot.

can anyone help with the listed problems? or am i too late and missed my chance to enjoy the so far amazing game cause my pc is gay??

[Tricorder]

from Half-Life 2 General Discussion forum to HL2 Problems, Errors and Help forum. Forum activity is irrelevant. You will be assimilated! Resistance is... ooops! Sorry about that. Don't worry about the forum being inactive. New threads are marked as unread for everyone who hasn't seen them yet and the entire forum is marked as unread until all threads in it are viewed. So, if someone drops by, your thread will not go unnoticed.

I'm not sure how much I'll be able to help you, but I can try. Say, does that said problem happen with any other game too or just Half-Life 2?

[Wudustan]

only the half life 2's really, i have the orange box and i'm sort of playing them through in order, but i haven't gotten far due to the tediously annoying crashes and errors and countless glitches i get. i read up around the sites that nvidia driver 163 was the one tailored for half life 2, i'm on 182, so one thing that I believe to be causing it is just the drivers too new if that makes sence- like how some older games need xp/2000 compatibility, but they might just be crackerjack theories.
I figured that since the modding community is so active, it'd be the case that at least someone else had the same problem and maybe found a way around it, or that there was some sort of community-developed fix.

[Tricorder]

That's possible. Sometimes old(er) games don't get along too well with new drivers. Problems may be various, ranging from minor graphic issues to game(s) completely not working.

I don't know if that is the case here too, but you won't know until you try using the older drivers. So, download version 163 from NVIDIA driver archive, uninstall your current drivers, reboot, install version 163, reboot again and see if that helped. I assume you know how to uninstall graphic drivers and install them again. If you don't, just ask.

[Wudustan]

Here's a few screens to give you an idea of what I mean

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

Edit:

I tried with the nvidia driver and it didn't help. Hmmm guess I'll just have to suck it up and keep playing restarting the game everytime it crashes

[Tricorder]

• Are you running some other (background) application along with the game? If you do, don't. Media Player, Winamp, iTunes, MSN, Xfire, Internet connection, even an antivirus or anything else - disable/turn off it all before running the game.

• Update your DirectX to the latest available version, if you haven't yet. Microsoft releases a new version of DirectX every couple of months. This means that you can have "DirectX 10" and yet not have the latest version. Keeping your DirectX up-to-date helps eliminate conflicts, as well as helping your games run as well as possible.

• Say, is there any patch you can install? I don't have this game, so I don't know if Orange Box version is already patched to the newest avaible version.

• How about reinstalling the game? Game files may become corrupted during installation or play, so reinstalling the game might solve the problem.

[Wudustan]

With steam it patches automatically and it defrags the game files itself so it prevent corruption. I dunno I'm stuck for ideas. Also updated my nvidia driver to the newest version. I'll keep browsing round modding sites and see if there's a fix posted by someone.
Thanks for your efforts man.

[Tricorder]

I'm taking a wild shot here, but this could be a multie-core CPU problem. Try forcing the game to use just one CPU core. Run the game, Alt-Tab out of it, press CTRL+ALT+Delete, find hl2.exe (or whatever it's called; you should be able to recognize it when you see it), right click on it and you should have the option (Set Affinity) to run on one core. I know Vista has such option, so I assume such option exists on XP too. That might help, altough it's just a shot in the dark. Good luck, though.