Newbie Question & Problem

[ddudley]

Hi,

 

This is my first posting, so if this has been discussed (and hopefully sorted out ) elsewhere in the forum, please forgive me.

 

I've only just bought and installed Fallout 3. To my shame, I'd never even heard of it, but now I've discovered it - Oh, boy!

 

I'm running Fallout 3 on a Dell XPS Inspiron M1710 - Intel Core 2 T7600 @2.33 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, Vista Home Premium and using an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX video card. I've downloaded and installed The Fallout Mod Manager and a number of mods.

 

The problem is that, sometimes, always in combat, my screen freezes. The game is still running and about every 2, or 3 minutes, progresses by a few frames. So it's not a total crash, more an extreme aslowing down. The problem seems to be associated with "enemies" - e.g. In Chevy Chase, when Lyons and her troops arefighting the super-mutants, the "freezing" occurs. When all the super-mutants have been destroyed, the game runs fine and I can move, talk fire etc. It freezes again when the mutany charges the group and unfreezes when its dead. Then freezes again when we all advance and meet 2 more enemies. This first happened when I went to the Queen Ant lair in "Those."

 

Help. please.

 

Thanks,

 

Ddudley

[mechine]

Lord help us all

 

 

 

 

 

Update your grapics drivers, eh

 

 

you should probably start with reading the pinned topics on the nexus forum

 

 

there's tons of information

 

 

 

As you get better at running mods, you get cleaner installs that work better.

 

There's a few different patch set ups that run either better or worse depending

on what you have an want

 

 

The book says Fallout was designed for 8600 GTX to run at max settings

Which is true I ran max settings with a 8800 an it was great

 

After the mods though it added in system tax (like the somewhat epic battle you talked about in Chevy Chase)

Sometimes there are 25-50 npc's running around all shooting me an each other which makes the system slow down

 

So I had to adjust my settings down to keep up with the added in chaos

 

 

There's tons of settings you can turn down an not even notice until past the halfway mark

 

Plus there are a few performance giving mods out there

 

 

 

You've got a nice computer set up so it should be able to run fine.

You'll have to tweek your computer an fallout settings though.

 

Also there are a few tricks you have to do, to get fallout 3 to work well with vista

 

 

I use XP so I don't really know much about Vista an fallout perse

 

They say install fallout 3 outside of program files in it's own folder

run it as admin an run it as windows XP SP3, probably more

I don't remember it though...

 

You should Clean off your desktop, to the minimum amout of stuff.

Also you shouldn't have much data on the desktop or in the

C:/documents an settings\username\desktop

 

I don't have a screensaver, or background, and there's only a few

shortcuts, goes along with defraging, and you can even put fallout

on a seperate hard drive, which is pretty great idea to get it even

further away from system files.

 

Here's a tweek guide, it's old but still good, http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_8.html

 

 

ums,

 

 

 

You using any mods yet?

 

 

Follow the pinned threads...

 

 

 

Pretty much you wana pick a patch set up

 

if you ask me the fake patch is kind of silly

 

the VATS mods pretty much clear up any issues

of messed up VATS in later patches past 1.0.15

So otherwise ignore patch 1.0.15 1.0.35 1.4

 

 

then pick either 1.5 or 1.6

 

for 1.5 you should use FO3edit's master update

 

and it's up to you if you wana master update 1.6

 

You should also use FOMM and FOSE

 

FOMM fallout mod manager

FOSE fallout script extender

 

FO3edit and GECK

 

 

 

What can I say it's really tough

 

I installed like 3 times before I got a good working game

and it still crashes from time to time.

I kind of got tired of working on it though

 

next time I install it will be even better.

 

 

The second time I installed I followed the Ultimate Load Order

which is listed in the mods on nexus, it's like a guide,

but it teaches you a lot of stuff

 

kind of outdated though, so you'll probalby wana delete it

an reinstall using what you learned after a month or two

 

 

 

ums

 

 

 

It's a total nightmare yeah, failures crashes an more

 

but it's worth it when you learn enough to get it running really well with 150 player created mods.

 

 

I mean if you just wana play it vanilla for a while without crashes it's great too

 

I played for a month before I even knew there were mods

 

 

 

So if you wanted to do that just follow the rules for vista, install it, patch it, update drivers, defrag hard drives, then tweek the settings

or anything else you can find that will help vista users.

[ddudley]

Mechine,

 

Thank you so much for such a comprehensive answer. I really appreciate it and the time you obviously spent on it.

 

I'll be following a great deal of your excellent advice.

 

Best wishes,

 

Ddudley

[ddudley]

For anyone who's interested, I followed the excellent advice I received from Mechine and disabled all my installed mods.

 

Lo and behold! the "freezing" problem disappeared.

 

All I have to do now is to work out which mods I can install and in what order without it coming back.