Help me Obi-wan-Cogi. You're my only hope. (:V)

[Taunto]

Welp, I got Half Life 2 finally, and started up a game. I got about 20 minutes into the game or so when all of the sudden my screen locked up and I had to alt tab out. I alt tabbed back in and all was fine for about another 30 minutes. Every time I would tab out and back in it would say that my video drivers had recovered from a failure. Hooray, I guess. I thought it might have been that I forgot to update DX, but I checked my dxdiag and it's all current.

That leaves only my video drivers. I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT card in a Dell Inspiron 1520 with Windows Vista.

I've checked the actual Dell website, but the drivers they have for this card are supposedly from about a month and a half before I got the computer so I'm pretty sure those are the ones this came preloaded with.

Do you know of anything other than the Video drivers that could be causing this problem and if it is the drivers, where I could find the correct new ones? Vista maybe?

Thanks!

[Chakkorisi]

Cogi will be the authority on this, but I can recommend patching and updating the NVidia drivers.

There are numerous Microsoft patches for Vista that target NVidia issues, and newer drivers from NVidia can help as well.

I had a similar issue with Vista and my 8800 card. Microsoft patching helped the lockups.

Chakk

[Eittik]

i have almost the same set up and i play some Half Life engine games and have the same issue, and never got a fix for it. I just alt tab =/

[Noircogi]

I recommend you go to:

http://www.nzone.com/page/home.html

And grab the item listed as HOTFIX: Windows Vista
Plus the latest drivers from their or nvidia.com. It should only help. I haven't played any halflife 2 in a long time, but it's a key title so should be well supported. Also, make sure you have the latest patches for the game itself.

Edit: I just noticed that you're trying to do this on a laptop.
The problem with playing games on laptops is that they're normally much more complex from a power-management standpoint. They take a lot of time to fully test/qual before shipping. Because of that, the OEMs don't like to ever release driver updates because they don't want to pay for a full qual cycle.

There are some sites out there which take current graphics drivers and modify the .inf files to add lots of laptops back in. That will make the driver show up as uncertified (any change invalidates the hash for the windows logo checksum). If you have Vista 64, you can't even load unsigned drivers without some registry hacking.

[Taunto]

I recommend you go to:

http://www.nzone.com/page/home.html

And grab the item listed as HOTFIX: Windows Vista
Plus the latest drivers from their or nvidia.com. It should only help. I haven't played any halflife 2 in a long time, but it's a key title so should be well supported. Also, make sure you have the latest patches for the game itself.

Edit: I just noticed that you're trying to do this on a laptop.
The problem with playing games on laptops is that they're normally much more complex from a power-management standpoint. They take a lot of time to fully test/qual before shipping. Because of that, the OEMs don't like to ever release driver updates because they don't want to pay for a full qual cycle.

There are some sites out there which take current graphics drivers and modify the .inf files to add lots of laptops back in. That will make the driver show up as uncertified (any change invalidates the hash for the windows logo checksum). If you have Vista 64, you can't even load unsigned drivers without some registry hacking.

Wow, that's incredibly lame.

I tried the hotfix and it said it didn't apply to my system when I tried to install it. I think it's time for you to crack the whip on some code monkeys and have them write me some new drivers! (:V)

Thanks for the help, cogi.

[Beledric]

I hope you bought HL 2 via the orange box

[Taunto]

I hope you bought HL 2 via the orange box

Nah, someone had a spare copy and gave it to me.

[Beledric]

hah they prolly bought th orange box =