Date: 11/24/07 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: no keywords

Hey guys

I have been having this problem now for the past year, my brother’s PC crashes during game play of Half Life 2, or any game that is based on the Source engine (Counter Strike Source, etc). The computer is an HP Pavilion a1528x, with Windows XP Media Center as the OS. Its got 1gb of ram, a Athlon 64 X2 (T) 3800+ 2.0 GHz processor, and motherboard brand HP/Compaq Nagami2-GL8E.

When we first got this computer it had the same problem of running the Half Life 2 engine. I figured the integrated graphics controller was crappy so I installed a NVIDIA Geforce 7600 GT 512mb Pci express video card.

NOW every other game we play looks amazing, and Half Life 2 engine games default go to high settings, but it still crashes after about 20 minutes of game play, or when we reach a particular part of the game. I reinstalled the OS, I manually removed all graphic drivers and installed the ones that came with the 7600, I did driver updates, I did DirectX 9 updates, but still for some reason the half life 2 engine crashes on this computer. My own computer at home I run a Pci (standard) 256mbg video card with 512mb of system ram and I never crash when playing HL2 at high settings.

I am considering swapping the vid card with my 256mg Pci one since I know it’s works. Although I doubt it will make a difference since this problem was occurring even before the any new vid card was installed. Maybe upgrading system ram, but that shouldn’t be necessary with the 1gb already there. I considered doing BIOS updates however it prompted me to back up all data, which is more work then I want to do if I am not even sure it will solve the problem.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. I have been banging my head over this for a while and I pretty much ran out of ideas.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computergeeks/1129700.html