ghsmith

Thanks, but I found that guide over a year ago when I first began playing Fallout3. the day after it was released. Since the game never even loads, no ini file gets created, and copying my saved, tweaked ini file into MyGames/Fallout3 does no good, because the game, as I have said, never finishes loading before crashing and consequently it never reads the ini file.

Tried all those very basic, newbie things long before I posted here, and would not have bothered posting if it were something as simple as that. I use Littleboy to disable G4WL and to manage the BSAs. I have the most up to date versions of FOMM, FOSE, FO3edit, etc. Nividia drivers are always updated to the most recent, and this is a fresh install of Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on a brand-spanking new (literally brand new the day before I posted my original message here) system (MSI NF980 mobo, AMD PhenomII x4 955 CPU, 8Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 PC1600 memory, and an XFX nVidia GeForce GTX260 896Mb 448-bit card).

All of a sudden Fallout3 refuses to even install. The other day I decided to re-install Fallout3 and play it once again. At that time I was using the same Windows XP setup, and hardware setup that I have been using since the day I bought Fallout3. There had been no system changes made of any kind. The game seemed to install perfectly as always, and I set my options to the ones I always use. Anyway, to make a long story short, when I launched the game, it started to load and then crashed to the desktop. I bought the game within days of it's initial release, and am installing off that same original retail disk. I didn't even have a chance to patch the game. So I un-installed it, rebooted, re-installed, and tried patching to the first official patch before trying to run the game. The 1.0.015 patch began to install, but before it finished, it tried to run the game, and everything crashed. As I was planning to upgrade to Windows 7 on the new system I have coming, I decided to wipe everything off the primary hard drive where I was trying to install Fallout, I installed Windows 7, did all the various driver installation (motherboard, video,sound, etc), and then installed Fallout no patches or mods at this pint, just the original version off the retail disk. It installed, but once again, as soon as I tried to run it, it crashed. As I said, this is the original retail box version, not a digital download version, not some questionable downloaded copy. I have never had any problem like this at any other time in the past, and as I said, prior to installing Windows 7 my system was 100% identical to the setup which has always worked without the slightest problem in the past.

Why bother to have a rating system at all if a negative, thumbs down has no effect? This reinforces what I have always believed, that there is a pervasive Pollyanna attitude that so-called "constructive criticism" can only be tolerated if it says good things. The definition of "constructive", is not "good", it's "helpful", and a negative appraisal can be helpful. If a mod is flawed, it serves no purpose to play ostrich or to stick your fingers in your ears and go "LA la la la, I don't hear the bad things so all the mods on my site must be good." It won't make Mr. Scary go away just because you pretend he doesn't exist. Admittedly, a few people abused the old system, but to simply pretend that there are no negative opinions, or to arbitrarily say "We don't care about any negative comments or want to hear anything but warm fuzzy thoughts", makes the entire idea of a rating system pointless. It needs to allow both positive and negative ratings and both good and bad need to count equally or it is worthless. If you can't think of a way to allow both, then just do away with the rating system altogether.