Wow. I've never had to do as much as I've done to try to get HL2 to work. Then again, there is no other game that I want to work more than HL2.
I am one of the many people getting crashes due to audio. I am using my nforce2 internal sound, because my audigy gamer caused the sound to stop, as well as the mouth movements of players (making me go thru a number of times to make sure the silence wasn't intentional.)
But one thing the audigy didn't do was cause my computer to crash. No blue screen, just cold reboot on crash. After playing with my sound settings in windows and hl2, trying a number of cvars, I was able to play for 10-20 minutes without a crash and no stuttering, so I figured I could live with that. I was wrong.
One time my computer does a cold restart. Windows XP had hung on me a couple of reboots later, but after rebooting it seemed to work fine. But this time, after hanging on load then rebooting, windows loads up in 16-color mode. I tried to change it, but it would always go to 640x480 16-color instead of what I chose. So I figured it was the new NVidia drivers I had just installed prior to installing hl2. I downloaded the 6.177 ones which worked in CS:S no problem. Then my comp decided to say goodbye.
On reboot, hang. On reboot with last good configuration, blue screen+restart instead of desktop. In safe mode, reboot instead of desktop. Completely dead.
So, I get to wait until work is over to bring home an XP CD. Wish me luck!
/rant
I am one of the many people getting crashes due to audio. I am using my nforce2 internal sound, because my audigy gamer caused the sound to stop, as well as the mouth movements of players (making me go thru a number of times to make sure the silence wasn't intentional.)
But one thing the audigy didn't do was cause my computer to crash. No blue screen, just cold reboot on crash. After playing with my sound settings in windows and hl2, trying a number of cvars, I was able to play for 10-20 minutes without a crash and no stuttering, so I figured I could live with that. I was wrong.
One time my computer does a cold restart. Windows XP had hung on me a couple of reboots later, but after rebooting it seemed to work fine. But this time, after hanging on load then rebooting, windows loads up in 16-color mode. I tried to change it, but it would always go to 640x480 16-color instead of what I chose. So I figured it was the new NVidia drivers I had just installed prior to installing hl2. I downloaded the 6.177 ones which worked in CS:S no problem. Then my comp decided to say goodbye.
On reboot, hang. On reboot with last good configuration, blue screen+restart instead of desktop. In safe mode, reboot instead of desktop. Completely dead.
So, I get to wait until work is over to bring home an XP CD. Wish me luck!
/rant
