Freezing in HL2

[Ruggerbugger]

For the last couple of days I've had a problem with Half Life 2 freezing and crashing the whole system. What happens is this:

For durations of 1-2 seconds the game will freeze (no movement or sound) with 1-2 second intervals. This will sometimes happen once and then I can play on, but will be followed shortly by another instance and a complete crash. I get no error message, just a blue screen (which doesn't quite fill the monitor) which won't go away until I restart. Occasionally on reboot the boot sequence stops at "Verifying DMI Pool Data". A hard reboot doesn't give this message.

I suspect overheating, but the fan on the card seems to be working. The card is pretty old, I'm considering looking for a replacement.

[evilb]

http://www.tweakguides.com/HL2_10.html

view to see if any of this helps you..

Try switching off the 3D menu background and video see if it will let you in any further.
how old is your graphics card and motherboard?
you might need to up date your bios on your pc and chipset of board and get the latest drivers for you graphics card..
what version of directx are you using?

O yes and A Happy New Year to you all for all the help in 2006

cheers

evilb...

[excalibur2]

The card is pretty old, I'm considering looking for a replacement.

Well I got thru HL2 on a gef4 ti4200 at 1024X768 no probs.

[Ruggerbugger]

I think you're misunderstanding, the problems are happening in the game, not during the menus. I've also played through the game several times before with this setup, so I'm not suggesting that there's any issue with the hardware coping.

[d3fiant]

if the hardware is getting old could be a fan failure or dust and crap gunking up the heatsink badly affecting its effiency. Might be an idea to give the system a spring clean, a rebuild never hurts as well

[theuncharmed]

I presume you've updated your drivers etc?

Also have you looked on the steam forums? Created a steam support ticket? I usually get a reply within a day and they've fixed all my problems so far.

[Jay]

right click on my computer go to properties

click on the advanced tab and then go to start up and recovery.

In there you should see a tick box that says Automatically restart. Untick it and tell us what the BSOD says next time it happens.

[kasavien]

Also in control panel -> administrative tools -> event viewer it logs errors that have occured, the same information as a blue screen would say. Find the errors that occured with hl2.exe and post on here. They'll be under system or application, i can't remember which.

What is your system spec?

[Ruggerbugger]

System spec now in drop down box. Last night Steam decided to bork on startup, complaining of some sort of memory exception error. The tip was to delete clientregistry.blob and let Steam update - although this doesn't seem to have fixed the problem.

On the other hand, I started HL2 from the start menu instead and played for four hours without a problem. I did give the box a good blast out the day before. Didn't seem to be much dust on the card heatsink, but it may have helped. As for the rebuild, some day I WILL sort out my cable spaghetti

[gabriel]

had exactly the same problem it was due to of the memory make, changed makes and it works fine since! just to check that possible too

[kasavien]

was there any sign in of the errors in the event viewer? If it's working now that's a good sign, hope you don't have any more problems

[gabriel]

had a blue screen something about Verifying DMI Pool Data, moreover have a look if you have 2 different memory types.


My problem was related that i had 1 block of 512 Kingston 667hz built as 1 512, and the native toshiba 512 which was 2*256, upon getting the same kingston memory the problem didnot appear again. (ate the not)

[Mattus]

You say you have cheapy RAM, which might well be the problem.

Is your CPU overclocked at all?