BSOD and abrupt restart while playing Half Life 2: Episode Two

[rohan]

I recently downloaded Half Life 2: episode two via steam. It launches fine and the intro video plays fine. But when the actual game starts.. after i make a few movements.. a blue screen is shown. A totally blue screen. There is nothing written on it.. it's just a blue screen. I reinstalled windows.. and after that there is no blue screen. The computer just restarts and when it does, I am notified that the system recovered from a serious error.

Drivers are not the problem. I have installed and reinstalled the drivers for my cards, rollbacked to previous versions, tried on the latest versions and reinstalled directX.. all that has been done.

Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode Two and Half Life: Lost Coast run perfectly on my PC.

Specs:

Windows XP MCE [SP2]
Intel Pentium 3.06 GHz
ATI X200 onboard chipset [sharing 256MB RAM]
1 GB RAM [768 available]

[QwertyManiac]

Its not always about your graphic drivers at times. Updating the audio drivers, etc sometimes affect it too.

Edit: I know you re-installed, but I am talking about updating if available.

[rohan]

Its not always about your graphic drivers at times. Updating the audio drivers, etc sometimes affect it too.

when i reinstalled windows.. every driver out there was reinstalled.

[edit]

i finally resolved this issue... i tried setting the following parameters to the game shortcut and it worked:

-nosound -window -dxlevel 80 +mat_forcehardwaresync 0

next, i removed the -window option and it still worked... So, i guess its working best at DirectX 8 and giving problems at DirectX 9.

[Krazy_About_Technology]

Ya thats what the case was. And previously, your had configured your system to not reboot automatically on a BSOD. It can be done in System Settings dialog. But when you reinstalled the default setting was restored and thats why it was rebooting without showing BSOD. Anyways, Enjoy Yourself! :-)