Loading Problem...

[Volver]

I enjoyed playing Half-Life a few months back, so I bought Half-life 2 a couple of days ago. On the menu screen, movements, like the bird and the people are choppy. When I press 'New Game' and it starts to load it always makes it more than half way, but it never finishes. My cursor is still moving, so I figured it might just be a processing problem. My laptop has all the requirements. It has a 2.0GHz processor (though the recommended system requirements stated 2.4GHz and the minimum being 1.2GHz), my video card has DirectX 9 level, it's an XP and I have 512 MB RAM. What's wrong with my computer? I don't think it's video card or anything and I have more than enough virtual memory. I tried to follow some of suggestions here, but so far, no luck.

 

[soulslicer]

do a check on your memory when in the game. press alt tab and ctrl alt del. and see how much physical mem you have left. make sure your hard drive is defragged and the game in your steam list is fragged also. if still doesnt work, reinstall?

 

[Cormeh]

What video card do you have? It's not likely to be that, but knowing may help.

 

[Volver]

do a check on your memory when in the game. press alt tab and ctrl alt del. and see how much physical mem you have left. make sure your hard drive is defragged and the game in your steam list is fragged also. if still doesnt work, reinstall?

As I stated, I already checked on my memory. I also defragged the game. I will try to defrag the drive then (how do you defrag the drive exactly?). If it still doesn't work I'll reinstall.

What video card do you have? It's not likely to be that, but knowing may help.

ATI Radeon Xpress 1100. I already checked this too, it has the DirectX 9 level that is recommended, the DirectX 7 level being a minimum, so it's most likely not my card. Plus, my laptop is 2006, the game came out before that. :/

 

[Diputs]

To defrag the drive, go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. Then select the disk and click defrag. You can also analyze it if you wish. It may take a while to defrag, especially if you have a lot of stuff on the drive.

I'd also not have anything else running while you're defraging, just to be safe.

You can buy other programs that defrag the drive, but I've never used them.

 

[soulslicer]

thats a pretty bad card seriously. but, it still must be able to run hl2. dropping your settings would stop the choppiness. but the reason why the game doesnt load, im not too sure.. whats your gfx memory?

 

[Volver]

Thanks Diputs and soulslicer0.

It's the card that came with my laptop and since I'm not an avid computer gamer I'm not wasting money on a card. I defragged and all, but it's still not working, the analysis said that my computer needed 15% free space to work properly, I have 16%, I'm trying to delete more unnecessary files but it's unlikely since I need them all for school and such. The movements in the game are smoother now, which I'm happy about, but the game still won't pass the loading point. I'm thinking of reinstalling but my friends have always had trouble with reinstalling their games so I'm a bit worried. Can someone give me a step by step instructions or did this pretty much cover everything? And how do I see my gfx memory? I'm computer illiterate with these things.