Half-Life 2 (steam) suddenly stopped working?

[Deleted User] · 25/02/11 - 15:51

Hi,

Lately I've been playing though HL2 for the second time, currently approaching Nova Prospekt. But since last week it's just been crashing on start-up. It shows Valve and plays the noise, goes to the Loading screen then goes black. I've done so much googling for answers and tried everything that looks relevant but nothing has fixed it

I've deleted and reinstalled it, checked the Steam cache and defragged it, checked for any updates my laptop might be missing - but the only thing that's changed is it now crashes back to desktop and the resolution stays screwed up. I'm wondering if it's a hardware problem, but I don't know why it would have suddenly developed as it's been running fine for ages.

I'm so fed up of ctrl-alt-del-ing, and I really miss playing! I hadn't got to kill a Combine with a watermelon yet

Does anyone have any ideas? (I'm not running a particularly great gaming laptop - no dedicated graphics card etc - but it copes with HL2, Portal and so on well.)

jkain · 26/02/11 - 11:05

You could try re-installing the steam client. Also it may be something that's changed with Windows that's causing the problem. You could try a system restore to a point before the problems started.

jim_uk · 26/02/11 - 11:52

Try updating or reinstalling your graphics and sound drivers, something may be wrong with them.

[Deleted User] · 05/04/11 - 04:03

Try this go to your steam game list right click HL2 select properties and click on set launch options and just type -dxlevel 8 like that. Let me know if that helps

Ash_735 · 05/04/11 - 09:10

I've been getting the same on Portal 1. Apparently it's something to do with Steam Cloud, so when the older games try and sync up, there's an error and the game crashes, annoying thing as the game still crashes when unchecking Steam Cloud from the Options.