OK, let’s see if I can word this well enough so that I get my point across… just FTR, I’ve looked elsewhere and tried other solutions, which I will do my best to relate below.
I recently bought the Fallout 3 Game Of The Year edition for my laptop. The install went off without a hitch for the most part, but now that I’ve got it installed I can’t even get through the first story sequence without the game freezing up. Just after my character is born, there is some dialog between the mother and father characters, and it’s during this time that you get to pick what your character will look like. In about a half dozen attempts, I’ve only made it through that process once before the game froze; other times it’ll freeze up before the father even gets one word in, and I’ve gotten through the naming step one other time. The background noise in the scene (mostly just a heart rate monitor) keeps playing after it freezes up, but the only way I’ve found to get out of the game after that is to Ctrl-Alt-Del my way to the Task Manager and end the application.
I first contacted Bethesda Softworks, the developer that made the game, and they asked me for my Direct X dialog (DXdiag) before suggesting that I try to run the program in Compatibility Mode. First problem with this is that I wasn’t entirely sure which file to run in Compatibility Mode. I ended up trying to run the Fallout3.exe file on my C: drive in Vista SP2 mode. Didn’t work.
Next I searched through the Fallout forums. I tried the solution listed here. Assuming I did everything right, the end result was the same freezing I experienced before.
After that, I’m honestly a little stumped. I’m not computer illiterate by any means, but I’m hesitant to do any mods or rewriting codes or any other crazy stuff that some of the users are doing. That and most of the users that discussed freezing or CTD issues on Fallout 3 at least got to play the game before something went wrong. Nobody seems to have had the exact issue I’ve had and posted about it that I can find.
It might be helpful to list my laptop’s specs, so I’ll do that below, but according to the Systems Requirement Lab’s Can You Run It? program, I should be able to play this game except for having Windows 7, which isn’t officially supported. BethSoft said as much as well.
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Processor: Intel Core i5 M430 (2.27 GHz)… I thought I had a quad core processor, which is why I tried the tip in the Fallout forums above, but cnet says it’s only a dual-core.
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 310M (512 MB)
Direct X 11
I think that’s all the relevant info. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as always. Last note, though: I’m leaving for Afghanistan tomorrow, so I may not be able to check the SDMB for a while. I’ll get to any requests for more info when I can, and if anyone has a fix to try, I’ll report when I can on its effectiveness. Thanks again.