TEch Help Please!!

[Bulldog75]

I just got HL2 for Christmas and It will not work on my computer. Every time I try to load a new game, it gets to the end of the status bar and hard boots my computer!! XP loves that and tells me how it recovered from a severe error. I updated my drivers for my NVidia GeforceFX 5200 128 MB vid card. I am having a little trouble updating my driver for my Soundblaster Audigy LS sound card. I downloaded the driver and used the exe, but it says to reboot and I do and nothing changes, it says that my driver was last modified in '03. Also, I saw on one of the HL2 help forums that sometimes the game has problems with Soundblaster cards and that you have to move them to different pci slots. I tried switching them around and that did nothing, and then I completely took out my soundcard and that made it reboot in the main menu loading screen. I have an AMD athlon 1.333 GHz and 512 megs of pc2100 DDR memory. I also have tons of space and installing it wasn't a problem. Please help, I want to play it before christmas break is over!!!
Thanks,
Matt

 

[Top Secret]

Wrong forum section bud! No prob, I'll help you. One of the mods will fix its location anyways.

Download this program: http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/

Driver cleaner. It sounds like your old drivers are *sticking* So remove them and then download fresh drivers from here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_66.93

Hope that helps.

 

[Bulldog75]

tried that

I just tried that on both my soundcard driver and my video card driver and it still did the same thing.
Thanks anyway,
Matt

 

[MajorPayne]

I just tried that on both my soundcard driver and my video card driver and it still did the same thing.
Thanks anyway,
Matt

I hate to tell you this, but your soundblaster may be damaged. I had a SB Audigy game card that worked great for a year, and then one day, my computer just turned off while I was using it (which is ODD, because I have it on a UPS, so it should NOT have had a power issue). After that, the soundblaster refused to install new drivers, and some games would reboot during installation. What I THINK happened is that one of the capacitors on the board (which regulate voltage) failed, and the card was made unstable by this. Even a re-install of Windows XP did not help. It still worked, but could not accept drivers, and I continued to have issues until I removed it, and got a SB Audigy2 card. I moved the SB live to another computer, and it does the same thing there -- will not update to new drivers (even with thier web update), and odd reboots/etc during game install. You may just need to get rid of it -- try using your motherboard's onboard soundcard instead (if you have one built in). If you remove the SB card, and the problem disappears when using the onboard soundcard, then dispose of your soundblaster, and get another card (or stick with onboard sound).

 

[Bulldog75]

I just don't understand why it rebooted when I took the card completely out. It should have worked then, shouldn't it have?

 

[MajorPayne]

I just don't understand why it rebooted when I took the card completely out. It should have worked then, shouldn't it have?

Did you still have the drivers in your system? If so, you may want to remove them first... Otherwise, it may not be the card at all, but some software issue hidden deep -- if that is the case, then a reformat/reinstall of Windows may be the cure you seek -- although the cure may be worse than the disease in this case!