HL2 Unplayable on Inspiron 8500 GeForce 4200go

Question

Hi,   I have an Inspiron with 512MB RAM, a P4 2.2 and a Geforce 4200go. I 've met with the min. system requirements for games such as Half Life 2, but when I start to play it becomes so slow (1 frame in 3 seconds or something) that it's unplayable. (with every visual option set on LOWEST, and 800X600)   This really annoys me.   Also, when I play Need For Speed Underground 2, the game itself runs fine, but the same problem appears in the 'ceremony' after every race, when the car makes a 360 when you've won the race. And adding people to the scene makes things a lot worse. I have the latest drivers from Nvidia, so that can't be it... Maybe it has something to do with DirectX 9.0c?   Can anyone help me out?   Thanx!

mateus · Answer

I think it's more likey a driver issue. Have you tried the Dell drivers rather than the Nvidia ones? HL2 runs at about 60fps @1024x768 on my Inspiron 8200 so it should run even faster on your machine!

JasonVC · Answer

Hi, thanks for the reply   That doesn't work either... I'm getting desperate... Does anyone have another idea instead of stuffing a radeon 9600 in my notebook?:smileytongue:

linuxer · Answer

Defrag your hard disk and update the driver to the latest Beta drivers from Nvidia.
then hl2 will run fine in 1024x768 all settings high. (And with the water patch you will able to play hl2 with all the graffic effects.

JasonVC · Answer

thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work either... :smileysad:

I don't understand what could be the ploblem. Could it be something else than my video card, because i have the latest drivers, and everything should be fine... The sound card maybe? or something else?

Or could it be that there is some kind of malfunction that should be repaired?

Does anyone have an idea? I'd be very grateful if the problem could be solved...

fozzy2005 · Answer

i have an Inspiron 8500 and a GeForce 4200go, using the drivers off the dell site that came out on the 1/12/04 and i have no probs at all, the only difference with my laptop is that its 2.4Ghz and i got 768 ram. game runs excellent at medium/high detail and 1024x768 res!

whats this water patch??

mateus · Answer

@TheFleshRocket wrote:

How do you check FPS in HL2?

With Fraps http://www.fraps.com/download.htm

@IS the GeForce 4200go a Directx9 card? If so, and HL2 is running in Dx9 mode, then it may not perform as good as say a Ati 9800. My GeForce4 440 is a Dx7 card (I think) and so HL2 runs in Dx7 but this means I can get 40fps with high settings @ 1600x1200.

If you've got the latest and most suitable drivers and your machine is free of spyware etc etc (and it's a legal copy of HL2) than there should be any problems. If you have problems with other game also then unfortunately I would try backing everything up and doing a fresh install of XP. :smileysad:

ofelas · Answer

ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/video/R88792.EXE

JasonVC · Answer

I've found it!! Thanks to Andrew, moderator on notebook review forum...

He said to download the drivers from www.omegadrivers.net. Those are the latest drivers for Nvidia and ATI, but they are tweaked to optimalise notebook graphic cards...

FPS is ok now, but i have another problem... In HL2, the game freezes for a second whenever a new sound is used. So, when I go down the wooden stairs for instance, a new wav is used for my footsteps, and right before that, the game freezes for a second... even with sound quality set on low... It's like the game forgot to cache the sound files or something...

Greetz...

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