loading and freeze problems

[bongtao]

Hi everyone, I'm new so be gentle OK? Got Episode One the other day and am having problems. It loads very slowly, sometimes not at all. The first time I actually got to play it, it was jerky and then froze. Tried uninstalling then reinstalling, now have problems with loading. I'm a complete novice with all this stuff, so if you can help me can you please make your responses idiot proof.

 

[Shasta]

What are your specs? ALL of them.

Are ALL your drivers up to date (mobo, graphics, sound, directX etc), and if so, were the old ones removed correctly BEFORE the new ones were installed?

When did you last de-frag?

How much HD space do you have spare?

 

[bongtao]

specs

Hi Shastra, I've got an Athlon 3500+, His Ati x850xt, not sure about the motherboard, an Albatron nForce of some kind I think. I've got about 45gig free on the hard drive, a long time since I defragged. Just updated my video card driver before the first post but didn't get rid of old ones. I was plsying Half Life 2 with no problems a week ago, but uninstalled it when I finished. Should I look for new drivers for the mother board and cpu? I have 1 gig of ram too.

 

[Shasta]

Hi Shastra, I've got an Athlon 3500+, His Ati x850xt, not sure about the motherboard, an Albatron nForce of some kind I think. I've got about 45gig free on the hard drive, a long time since I defragged. Just updated my video card driver before the first post but didn't get rid of old ones. I was plsying Half Life 2 with no problems a week ago, but uninstalled it when I finished. Should I look for new drivers for the mother board and cpu? I have 1 gig of ram too.

I don't know much about ATi cards, but yours is pretty old. It COULD just have had it. It not exactly great anyway.

Defragging is VERY important for a smoothly running system. Do it.

Correctly un-installing your old graphics drivers BEFORE installing the new ones is even MORE important. Un-install ALL your graphics drivers then re-install the new ones.

 

[bongtao]

thanks

Thanks Shasta, I will let you know how I go.

 

[Naudian]

Your specs hold up perfectly fine...def. some odd software issue.

Maybe you have some background program/process that's eating up resources?

Try out different settings in the video options, like getting rid of HDR and stuff.

Are you using XP or Vista? Source games(and many others) don't always run great on vista...

 

[bongtao]

How do I find out if I have programs running in the background that are eating up my processor and is it safe to turn them off? Will they need to be turned back on manually. Still can't get the game to load, it just stops half way through. I'm running Vista.

 

[Naudian]

I'm running Vista.

Yeah there's your problem -_-

You can view background processes in the task manager.
You can get to that by pressing ctrl alt delete, or you can just right click on the taskbar and select it from there.
Click on the Processes tab. If you see anything on the list that is taking up a lot of CPU or Memory then you might have to do something about it. Ignore "System Idle Process" though...
If you want info on a process just google the name of it. You don't need to manually restart processes...if something goes wrong just restart PC.

You shouldn't end anything that is a Local Service, Network Service, or System process.

Chances are it's not even a background process thats causing the problem...do what Shasta said about video drivers for one thing.

also, did you mean that game won't even load up from steam? Or it just wont load a map? Have you tried out different video settings?