hl2 crash issues?

**JeLi** · 05-19-08, 10:28 PM

So I downloaded orange box, and the first thing I played was Portal. Later I moved on to TF2. Recently I tried to play Half-Life 2, and I had crashes all over the place. Granted I had a couple crashes here and there at first with Portal and TF2, but I think I managed to iron out the problems with a little tweaking. First, I couldn't even get Half-Life 2 to the game menu, then I finally got the menu, but the game would crash when trying to load a new game. After digging through the Steam support forum, I got the game to run with the -window -dxlevel70+mat forcehardwaresync0 and made it to the second chapter of the game with no problems. I wanted to try bumping up the settings so I wouldn't have to play at such a small resolution, but that brought the crashes back.

I noticed the system requirements for HL2 are lower than those for Portal and TF2. Any thoughts? :8 Here's the poor machine I'm trying to run it on:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz
1 GB RAM
GeForce 8400GS 256Mb
some unspecified onboard sound card

Help/advice greatly appreciated!

**HeavyG** · 05-20-08, 05:00 AM

That system should run HL2 just fine... not at the full graphics detail and highest res, but it should run it fine.

It really sounds like an operating system issue. I would do the following: Check all of your drivers for updates, run virus and adaware scanners to see if anything is taking up system resources, defrag your hard drive, and finally use a good registry cleaner.

When you load the game, make sure you close any programs you do not need open (Norton, Xfire, AIM, basically anything you have running in the background) to free up resources.

If it still crashes, I recommend doing a reinstall of Windows. I know it is a pain in the ass, but it wills start you out at a clean slate. Just make sure you find every driver required prior to the install.

As for possible hardware failure... crashes are usually associated with instability. Instability can easily be caused by heat. Is your video card or CPU cooler caked in dust? If so, clean it off. You also might want to try reappling some thermal compound to your CPU cooler heatsink. With a CPU that is pushing two years old, it is definately overdue. I recommend arctic silver 5, but evem a generic thermal compound should do the trick.

If you don't want to work on the operating system unless as a last resort, try the dusting and resetting your heatsink with the new compound... it might do the trick. Just make sure you clean the old compound off first... and don't get it on any of the CPU pins.

**JeLi** · 05-20-08, 10:45 AM

It really sounds like an operating system issue. I would do the following: Check all of your drivers for updates, run virus and adaware scanners to see if anything is taking up system resources, defrag your hard drive, and finally use a good registry cleaner.

Done. The only thing I haven't tried updating is the mobo BIOS.

When you load the game, make sure you close any programs you do not need open (Norton, Xfire, AIM, basically anything you have running in the background) to free up resources.

Also done.

If it still crashes, I recommend doing a reinstall of Windows. I know it is a pain in the ass, but it wills start you out at a clean slate. Just make sure you find every driver required prior to the install.

Sort of done. I did a system recovery from the recovery partition, which performs a "non-destructive" recovery of all the system files (or so it tells me). I did back up all my data, so maybe I can try a full format and reinstall. Technically, I haven't tried running HL2 with a higher DX level since the restore.. mostly because I'm afraid my computer will explode again :P

As for possible hardware failure... crashes are usually associated with instability. Instability can easily be caused by heat. Is your video card or CPU cooler caked in dust? If so, clean it off. You also might want to try reappling some thermal compound to your CPU cooler heatsink. With a CPU that is pushing two years old, it is definately overdue. I recommend arctic silver 5, but evem a generic thermal compound should do the trick.

Forgot about this one. I'll try this too. Thanks for the help!

**JeLi** · 05-20-08, 07:56 PM

I tried running HL2 now that my system's been restored.. and it works! Wheee! Guess there was something wrong with my system files after all. Figures :P Thanks for the help!