Fallout 3 Crashes when I save...

[Toxius]

I've recently bought the GOTY Edition of the retail Fallout 3. I installed it and all the DLC's on the disc, and then went about playing it. It crashed every thirty minutes or so, so I downloaded Patch 1.7, thinking it may help. I was then able to play for 45 minutes. So I looked up the Archive Invalidation feature and used it, and downloaded the Unofficial Patch and applied it. It worked forever, no crashes, no noticeable glitches other than random and far between framerate jumps. Then, after I'd made it to level 13 and had played for 40 hours or so, it started crashing whenever I saved. If I didn't save, the game would run flawlessly. If I did save, it crashed instantaneously.

Please help me out here; this has got to be the best damn game I've ever played, and now it's nearly unplayable. I used the core limiter, since I have a quad core machine, and I've gone through countless searches on google on how to fix this. Nothing seems to work.

My Specs:

Alienware M15x Laptop

Windows 7 Home Edition 64 bit (6.1 build 7600)

i5 Quad core @ 2.53 GHz

4 Gigabytes of RAM

DX11 compatible

nVidia GeForce GTX 260M (Main Driver: nvd3dumx.dll, nvwgf2umx.dll, version 8.17.12.6635)

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I haven't been able to save my game in a week, and I'm stuck with just trying to fix it. If it helps, I had the "More where that came from" mod installed, and all six sections included and running. I disabled them, and it did nothing. So I don't think it's the mod.

 

Please help!

 

-Geoff

[jaywalke]

Dear Geoff;

FO3 is a spectacular achievement which, in it's dark side loves to not love you back when you need it the most. Therein realizing it to be fickle, go to users in Win7, Users/save games. There, load your first hard autosave after exiting the vault. You will not lose your other saves. Play for a moment and see if it will manually quicksave or hard save as you stroll towards the Springdoodle town ruins. If you can save there, alas, in your last save prior to the forty hours, you'll laugh, cry and kiss that forty hours goodbye. Find your last good save and begin again from there. A word of advice is that you quicksave after every skirmish or fast travel. The game says it is autosaving but never does on any of the three OS I've used, including the only perfectly working copy of Win7 64 known to be in existence. Save often and you only mutter a mite when the crunch arrives. It is also much easier to diagnose when you can localize and approximately pinpoint where things went South on you.

The only true fact of life regarding this game is that no one knows it all, not even Bethesda or it would not have released the G.E.C.K. and other source code so the collective minds of many could plug the small programming holes and they didn't have to eat the liability. Kudos to them. Microsoft just tells you to .... ...! I check my content a few days a week so if the foregoing didn't help, try me again.

 

Luck to You,

Jaywalke