System Tweaking for Games

[Triforce1]

Hey, I have some questions. I have been running Oblivion for about a year or two now, and with minimal problems. Some CTDs when I had too many giant mods, but I've gone back to the basics I want and things are fine. Since I got the game, I've had it on Ultra High with no ill effects from that department. Now, I've just gotten Fallout 3 for Christmas, and the trouble has begun. It has to be my system, because I have not a single mod running. But first, some system information.

 

I'm running both Vista Ultimate and XP Professional on my machine; one 150GB WD Raptor hard drive to each system, no RAID. Oblivion has been running on XP, and I've put Fallout 3 on Vista for the DX10. I have a BFG-overclocked nVIDIA Geforce 8800GTX, 3GB of Corsair Dominator RAM, an ASUS Maximus Extreme motherboard, and an Intel QX9650 CPU. In my mind, enough machine to run everything I can find on the best or close to the best settings for a couple of years (from when I assembled it, last year). Nothing is overclocked past factory. If it matters, I'm running it on 1280x800 resolution. Yesterday, I got Vista SP1, and I'm up to whatever the most recent SP is for XP.

 

Now, to the issue at hand. Fallout detected my hardware settings as High, but I put it on Ultra just to see. Game ran fine about halfway through the tutorial thing (Vault 101 and Character creation), and then I experienced a CTD. Not so bad, I thought, just return settings to what was recommended to me and things will be fine. Well, things did indeed go fine. For a couple of minutes. Within two hours of play after that, I experienced four CTDs, two of which did some really strange things before booting me out. One required me to restart the system. After all this, I noticed that the problem was a display driver with some ridiculous name, "nvlddmkm.sys", had stopped responding, but had recovered. I looked it up, and found this. I downloaded the most recent nVIDIA drivers from the site, being v180.48 for Vista and a general update for my Graphics card. I followed the instructions from that linked page, and voilà, things seemed to be working great. Between then and last night, however, I experienced two more CTDs though. So, I finally got around to Vista SP1. This morning, I fired up my system, and logged about 2 hours on Fallout. Then, I was about to get off anyway, and another CTD hit. One of the weird ones I talked about earlier; the screen went black, then went to desktop, then went back to the game, except everything was either black or purple tinged except for my hand and gun. All the while, sound kept going and I had no mouse. I finally got it calmed down, and so I am here. My question is this: how can I stop those damn CTDs and just enjoy the game?

 

My thoughts are that with a detailed query and specific occurrences, someone can help me. Thank you for your time in advance,

 

-Triforce1

[bben46]

I don't think you can stop all of the CTDs. Just minimize them as much as you can,

 

As to causes, there is a great write up on the Beth site Here:

 

Here is the link to the Bethesda Softworks board unofficial FAQ. Lots of good info there - read the entire thread it's worth your time.

Some of the advice is a little out of date last update is shown as April 2007. But most is still very much relevant.

 

I have seen xfire, an antivirus program, Windows indexing service and a HP printer driver that liked to call home cause CTDs

 

http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.ph...p;#entry8103714

 

For the best tweaking, Tweak Guides is awesome. Be sure to do the system tweaks, then the graphics card tweaks then the game tweaks in that order.

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Contact.html

[Triforce1]

Thank you very much, I will try these suggestions out immediately.