Salka

Unlocking Half-Life 2

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I used to live in an even deeper and darker hole in Ireland, and I have an 11Mbps piper straight to LONDON there.

Who the hell uses dialup anymore?

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Who the hell uses dialup anymore?

Actually, lots of people who live in the countryside don't have the choice... My dad's been wanting broadband for a year now, but my parents live in a village in the middle of the south of England, and the entire village is too far away from the nearest exchange for the phone lines to support an ADSL signal. There's no cable connections outside of major towns and cities either so cable modems are out too. Apparently next February, a new exchange is being installed and my parents' village will be right on the border of what's supported as far as signal strength is concerned, so here's crossing fingers...

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[ADSL helpdesk info blurb]The maximum lenght of an ADSL line from house to dslam is 5 KM, and if you're at 5KM then you can only get 128/128 kbps if the copperwire is brand new and properly maintained. So the rural area's are screwed cause the phonecentres are too far spread out. They will never see fast internet untill they scientist come up with a way to increase the line lenght and the comercial bobo's find it comercially viable to upgrade the network.[/ADSL helpdesk info blurb]

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Who the hell uses dialup anymore?

Trep twak.gifTwilarse

That's for your condescension. Go outside and meet the real world.

We have a similar situation here in cow country (1 1/2 hours from downtown Chicago), although it's only DSL that's currently unavailable. My brother-in-law previously had cable connection, but he's such a moron, ended up installing satellite internet (even after I told him how unstable it was), and I've been stuck with a bandwidth cap ever since. On top of that the connection is interrupted (often for several hours) during storms or high winds, and the satellite itself is susceptible to the caprices of the weather. In the past several months we've had several cases already where I spent an hour or so each time talking a bunch of customer service reps in India just find out wtf is going on whenever we get kicked offline. :frusty:

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Does Half Life 2 crash a lot for anyone else? It depends on the level it seems, but it varies from every one or two hours, to every ten minutes. Annoying.

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Does Half Life 2 crash a lot for anyone else? It depends on the level it seems, but it varies from every one or two hours, to every ten minutes. Annoying.

For me it crashed once, after I repeatedly died defending a plaza from the Combine soldiers.

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For me it crashed once, after I repeatedly died defending a plaza from the Combine soldiers.

It started crashing consistently for me after I upgrdaded to the latest NVidia display drivers (66.93). Once I downgraded the problem went away again.

Moral of the story: if it ain't broke...

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Trep twak.gifTwilarse

That's for your condescension. Go outside and meet the real world.

We have a similar situation here in cow country (1 1/2 hours from downtown Chicago), although it's only DSL that's currently unavailable. My brother-in-law previously had cable connection, but he's such a moron, ended up installing satellite internet (even after I told him how unstable it was), and I've been stuck with a bandwidth cap ever since. On top of that the connection is interrupted (often for several hours) during storms or high winds, and the satellite itself is susceptible to the caprices of the weather. In the past several months we've had several cases already where I spent an hour or so each time talking a bunch of customer service reps in India just find out wtf is going on whenever we get kicked offline. :frusty:

Wait a minute: So your brother-in-law installs this new garbage, and YOU have to call for support? Is he even aware of the crappiness that he installed, or isn't he around when your connection breaks down again?

--Erwin

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It started crashing consistently for me after I upgrdaded to the latest NVidia display drivers (66.93). Once I downgraded the problem went away again.

Moral of the story: if it ain't broke...

Figures.

I updated just after I installed the game. Some of the stuff on the Counterstrike tech-demo/system-test was looking messed up, so I thought new drivers would fix it. That particular problem didn't change and it turns out Half Life 2 itself looks fine without DX9 graphics anyway. Now I'm stuck with the crashing though.

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"The changes in this release are directed at reducing the problem some users are experiencing with sound stuttering. The sound stuttering is not indicative of a sound problem, sound stuttering is only a symptom of texture thrashing on your video card or AGP memory. For information on how to reduce texture thrashing visit this link on our support site:"

how do I know it got updated? I ran steam, but the focus was away from it for a while so I didn't see any messages informing me that it was updated. and when I check "update news" for HL2, it just displays the old message "pre-loading started".

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Wait a minute: So your brother-in-law installs this new garbage, and YOU have to call for support? Is he even aware of the crappiness that he installed, or isn't he around when your connection breaks down again?

I volunteered to keep tabs on it (i.e., talk to very pleasant natives in India - I love their accent) specifically to prevent him from fucking things up even more. Well hey, it's his damn money he's blowing out the chimney, so as long as I have my connection I'm happy....more or less. Currently he's working his ass off (6 days a week) to buy a 60" LCD HDTV for the living room so he can watch satellite broadcasts (as well as impress the neighbours, hoo hoo!). And yeah, he's gonna need to install a separate satellite for that (which is what he does for a living). See, he's from Turkey and he's merely after the.......*drum roll*.......AMERICAN DREAM!!! [cue sickeningly sweet violin music]

Funny, I don't remember my family showing off expensive gadgety toys to neighbours just to make them feel inadequate. :innocent:

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This was also in that news update

Next week we will be releasing the Source SDK, along with a surprise for the community.

Yay!

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Funny, I don't remember my family showing off expensive gadgety toys to neighbours just to make them feel inadequate. :innocent:
I believe I am living the American dream: I am fat, undersexed, rude and poor but I entertain delusions of vertical social mobility. That is all it takes...

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The update didn't really solve the stuttering for me. In some places it seems to have increased, and decreased in others.

But I discovered that some of the large Source files are the most fragmented files on my hard drive (probably because of how they were loaded over a long time period -- probably Steam didn't allocate the whole size of the file in the beginning). I bet that's a big part of the problem. Gonna do a defrag now...

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Ever since I updated my machine I've had no problems with anything whatsoever. Shocking really. All the games that were buggy to others were just fine for me, the windows has never crashed and there are no adverse hardware problems on the whole.

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What do you mean by updated? Updated the hardware?

Anyway, I just came and saw that as per my extreme luck in these cases as it has always been, THE FUCKING STEAM FILES WERE EXACTLY THE ONES THAT DIDN'T GET DEFRAGMENTED:......

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What do you mean by updated? Updated the hardware?
Aye.

Inspired by you, I did a defrag myself and everything is in line... exept for a few steam files... which are only some 250Mbs...

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Inspired by you, I did a defrag myself and everything is in line... exept for a few steam files... which are only some 250Mbs...

I'm STILL doing a defrag... stupidly I tried WinXP's own program, and then SpeedDisk. Neither of them could defrag the Steam files and some others. But they use different strategies it seems so defraging with one doesn't make the next defrag with the other one faster. And while one shows 1% fragmentation, the other shows 35%... aargh.

Then I decided to get another program and after not finding a good comparision decided to download PerfectDisk 7.0 30-day trial, which seems to be doing a good job but is taking hours...

I guess I'm going to have to keep defragging once in a while. I haven't done it very often because I've some negative experiences from before. In the past, both the SpeedDisk (which I now found has received much negative comments) and Windows' own defragger have often taken long times to defrag without actually reducing the fragmentation much...

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Well, that seemed to pay off well... this program managed to create 11GB of largest free space instead of the <1GB of NortonSpeedDisk / Windows Defrag.

And the slowness may have been caused by me surfing the web at the time...?

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Well, that seemed to pay off well... this program managed to create 11GB of largest free space instead of the <1GB of NortonSpeedDisk / Windows Defrag.

And the slowness may have been caused by me surfing the web at the time...?

Dude! It is unhealthy to be doing stuff on your computer when it's defragmenting itself. A lot of data is being moved around, if something goes wrong and some program commits hara-kiri, possibly important information may be lost. When defragging I summarily turn off everything in the background and unplug the net cable... then I bite the keyboard cable in half and throw the mouse over the far ledge of my table -- just so that I wouldn't be tempted to do anything.

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Erkki, you're dumb. :owned:

A defrag session for me is usually done at night before going to bed, hopefully by morning it'll be done. If not, that's a great time to be doing something else, like gaming on the Xbox or writing letters.

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I don't think it's that dangerous. It may make it a lot slower, but Firebird has never crashed on me. I of course did close every background process etc. And the only files Firebird should mess with are cookies/temp. files.

The defragment programs / Windows must have some kind of checks for files being used, otherwise there would be at least some mention in the help of using other programs at the time being dangerous.

I was stupid though. Or purposefully ignoring this because I had nothing else to do at the moment. When I was surfing the process stayed at 70% or so for an hour but when I left for half an hour it had completed.

Anyway, this still didn't help with Half-Life 2 much, still stuttering. Perhaps there's now less of it in the cut-scenes, can't really tell.

Can I use my pc while defragmenting?

Yes, however, the utility may take an hour or two to run and slows down other applications; so, you might want to defragment your hard drive when you are not using your PC.

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The safe mode messes up my icon placement (or was it something else). Anyway, it messes up some explorer settings so I never use it (unless i really have to). I generally agree it's for the best to close everything when running defrag, though.

PerfectDisk has this "offline defrag" mode that will start after a reboot (like window's scandisk) and optimize the page file and maybe something else too.

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