Borked video card?
So I boot up Steam to play Half-Life 2 today, I’m happily killing Combine along Highway 17, I manage to get into Sandtraps, all in the course of about 20 minutes when all of the sudden…
My screen freezes. Sound has stopped. Textures in game are severely discolored with little purple pixels scattered without. My gravity gun has turned brown. Finally, my computer succumbs to the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
So I reboot and run Half-Life 2 again, this time avoiding the part that caused trouble. I get about five minutes further when my screen freezes again, and my computer crashes once more.
Looking at the BSoD message, it seems my nv4_disp.dll driver was caught in an infinite loop. I have an nVidia GeForce 6800 video card, 256 MB onboard RAM. A nice card for its time, and now it appears to be malfunctioning. Whoopee.
So I talk to my friend n00bguy about the problem. He suggests running HL2 windowed and at the lowest graphics settings possible. I do so, and I manage to get through most of the Sandtraps chapter, at the pain of looking at horribly low-res textures, aliased models, with no neat lighting effects. For the most part, it works, and he says to start maxing one video setting at a time, starting with texture detail. I do so, I make it about 10 minutes more, and then it dies.
After rebooting, he suggests updating my video card’s drivers. Seeing as I haven’t updated since I bought this computer in December 2005, I imagined a little update wouldn’t hurt. I pinpoint the driver installer, download, install, run Half-Life 2, fail, die, anger ensues.
So, a $2000 computer, and I’m pretty sure you can see my frustration with both my sound card and video card not working the way they should. My friend is a tech support guy, so I’ll get him to take a look at it before I send it in for expensive maintenance.
For the time being, this means:
No HL2, Gmod, or games in any way
No comics – Yes, I know I just announced a bi-weekly May onward release yesterday, but this problem came up without warning. I’m sorry to disappoint.
In good news, my new Xbox 360 came today. I can tell it’s new because it doesn’t have my old Gears of War side decals on it. I booted it up and it works fantastic. Time to go play Gears of War to distract me from this dreadful video card shit.
Seems like your having all the luck this month huh?