Fallout 3 The Pitt DLC unexplainable blackout

[Vinca]

Hi guys,

 

I have a problem. Whenever I play "The Pitt DLC", after about half an hour Fallout just crashes my entire system. My screen blacks out and I can't even ctrl+alt+delete anymore, so I manually have to shut down my laptop, reboot it again and load my last save-game. I just don't dare play fallout 3 anymore, because I'd hate to screw up my laptop due to the large amount of manual shut-downs.

 

PLEASE can anyone here give me some advise as on how to tackle this problem?

 

I've got a HP Pavilion dv7-2050ed, if anyone wants to know the specs of the laptop just google it.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

PS: I've tried playing without all other mods and dlc's (I've got Mothership: Zeta, Operation: Anchorage and The Goggles that do nothing installed) and it still crashes. My problems only occure while IN The Pitt and I have the 1.7 version of Fallout 3 installed.

[fap6000]

I'm not going to look up your specs.

 

It's probably not as dangerous as you think it is. That would depend on a few different things. First thing you would want to do is duplicate the problem, just like anything else. I'd only focus on a few things here. The first one being duplicating the problem in a new game start. This would either point to or rule out a corupted save game as the cause of your Freeze. Then just about every fallout 3 player who is using a computer which uses a Multi core CPU is going to have freeze issues. Quote from Tweek guide below. http://www.tweakguid...Fallout3_1.html

 

"Some dual core and quad core CPU users have said that by inserting a new command iNumHWThreads=2 under the General section of Fallout.ini, and setting it to a value of 1, 2 or 4, this prevents freezing at certain points in the game. In practice this setting should not be required, as it appears to restrict the number of threads used by the game, however you can experiment with different values depending on how many cores of your CPU you want the game to use."

 

The next one would be putting all of your fallout 3 grapics settings on the lowest amount possible. The tweek guide comes in here too. This points to the grapics card itself. A 256 Mb or even 512 Mb video card is going to get taxed to the max on games like fallout 3. Lower settings means less video card ram being used. It could be the case you need to turn it down all the way an then even further. Then depending on your hardware an other things it may only crash half as much.

 

As with any other computer, heat is the main issue. Some laptops catch on fire, heh. It's all micro tech tightly packed into a chassis. Heat somewhat relates to performance, but the main thing is that it can kill the hardware before it's time. Fried motherboards an video cards. The average lifespan is around 3 years. If you tax the system from using awesome games with high quality settings it might half life it, meaning something gets fried around 1 1/2 years. So you either use something to cool it more, or turn down settings, or plan to buy some new parts. You could have a heat problem that is starting to show from the laptop being a few years old now.

 

It sounds to me like a freeze issue. Which isn't that dangerous. It's going to reboot the system an be fine. There's really only one or two conditions where we are like "omg I just killed my computer" One of them is BSOD (blue screen of death) Which is the computer system shuting itself down to avoid damage. When the system BSOD's you get a error code, and it also creates a mini-dump of what happened, which you can use mini-dump readers to figure out what caused it. That beind said BSOD or even you freezing problem is pretty normal stuff, an it's designed to do that for reasons. So really there's only one thing that's "like OmG I just killed my computer" Which is jumbled up garbage on the screen.