Fallout3/Vista, troubleshooting steps

lordbeanlordbean Ontario, Canada
edited July 2009 in Gaming
For anyone who's ever WANTED to get into fallout 3, but gave up after it crashed or froze one too many times. List is long because I had to fix all of the listed problems on my PC to get fallout 3 to behave itself.

Link goes to my personal googlepages site. I use it as a sort of online bookmarks list since I reformat and/or switch PCs so often.

http://lordbean.googlepages.com/fallout3fixes

Incidentally: Holy blast from the past. My last post here was in 2005. Talk about reappearing out of nowhere.

Comments

  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    Welcome back
  • MrTRiotMrTRiot Northern Ontario Icrontian
    edited July 2009
    I got my F3 working by switching compatibility to XP and running as Admin...
  • lordbeanlordbean Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2009
    Not everyone experiences the same set of problems from it. There are lots of luckier people out there who have it run perfectly without doing ANY troubleshooting.

    Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. The steps I posted are basically a list of all the things I had to do to get it to stop crashing on my own PC. Since I had to fix so many, I thought I'd share it for other people's potential benefit. It doesn't necessarily mean everyone HAS to apply all the fixes to get it working.
  • lordbeanlordbean Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2009
    I've now found a patchy solution to the memory leaks the game has as well as the other stuff posted on my site. I've noticed the game will always crash eventually, even though there's nothing wrong with the system. However, I've noticed that the bigger I make the windows page file, the longer it runs stable. As of now I'm running a 100GB swap file on my games drive... I've noticed after about an hour or two of run time, the HD light starts to wink on and off in a consistent manner, which likely means the game has leaked its way through my 8GB of physical ram and started using the page file. Theoretically, the bigger the page file, the more space it has to leak into, which means the longer it should run without a crash. The same may also apply to oblivion.

    TLDR version: Use a monstrous page file to run fallout 3. Gives it more memory to use, which helps because of leaky code.
  • lordbeanlordbean Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2009
    More new data concerning another possible crash case. I noticed when I had my dual core conroe in the game never crashed. When I put my yorkfield quad core back in, the game started crashing again. I used msconfig to limit the number of cores used by the system to 2 and rebooted, and the game is now running stable.

    For owners of CPUs with more than 2 cores, it may be necessary to temporarily force windows to use only 2 cores for the duration you want to play the game.
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