half life game ?'s

[longway]

my son is having problems with this game on a brand new dell 1500 vostro notebook , first it loads(the game) with all the updates but when he begins to play it freezers up , he's runnung 1.4, 800 fsb, gforce 8400m gs card 2gigs of ram ,xp home, with the latest directx 9c, he's run this game on other older computers without a problem , he dose have that utility from dell running his network on this computer instead of microsofts but I don't know if that makes a difference because he played a game offline and it still frozed up ,thwere are no issues in device manager and i tested all in directx diagnostic , no problems , so can someone explain where this problem may be with ?

by the way I tried to get microsoft to manage the network but can't get that dell utility to not to be the default program but it just doesn't work , it worked on my old computer dell 600m but that was an older program ,

Thanks in advance!

[CrazyCrusher]

Are you talking about HL 1? or Half life 2? try do a disk clean up, defrag your Hard drive and down load CCleaner from www.filehippo.com use that to clean up old registery files, reboot your system after your done, if that dosent work try a reinstall.

[longway]

this is a brand new laptop , half life 2 , he installed it 3 times 2 times by the disks and once by downloading , got all the updates , defrgmented the harddisk a few times did a disk cleanup as well,

he's played this on a couple of different computers with xp and never a problem he bought this computer just for this game,

is it possible that even that he tried playing without going online that it might be the DELLS utility program for networking connections used as a default in this laptop instead of microsofts ? just some thoughts because there isn't nothing else thats different then what was on the other computers except this utility that made its self a defult program for the internet, just my thoughts to bring this up!

Thanks

[Shoreguy]

Before launching the game, turn on your error logs in windows (start/right-click 'my computer', manage). You may be able to capture what the cause of the lockup is. Alternately, completely uninstall the game and remove the video drivers...utiliies for completely removing them are easily found here under tools. Next, go to nvidia.com , download and install the latest non-beta drivers. While at nvidia, you can check driver release notes to see if there's issues with the game, etc. Then reinstall hl2.

[longway]

Before launching the game, turn on your error logs in windows (start/right-click 'my computer', manage). You may be able to capture what the cause of the lockup is. Alternately, completely uninstall the game and remove the video drivers...utiliies for completely removing them are easily found here under tools. Next, go to nvidia.com , download and install the latest non-beta drivers. While at nvidia, you can check driver release notes to see if there's issues with the game, etc. Then reinstall hl2.

I seen one more thing under direct x dianostics where as d3d9d.dll Finale Debug had a problem so I did a search and removed the directx SDK , I went to mange and didn't see any logs for a problem that would have been for whats wrong , anyway I tried yesterday downloading directly from nvidia but they won't let me install from there, they said to go to Dells site for any drivers for the card, still working on it , my son has tried another but older game in the computer and that worked OK , this one still keeps crashing one minute into the game

[longway]

I was just looking and reading some reviews over at dell and read that this video card dosn't support newer games its a , 8400m gs, 128 mb graphic card , do you think this is the reason , it was just one review that I accually read , ??