Computer gurus & HL2/Steam Users , need input, advice..
 

Having a problem with Half-Life 2 .. I had been able to play this game before with no problems at all. But now when I do play it is a bit choppy at times, and kind of stops for a second at the most, but it's very annoying as it's frequently happening.

A while back some admin on Counter-Strike (i think) did something to my steam and my CS ran choppy as well.. I am wondering if this has something to do with it?

I am at a loss, this kind of stuff totally confuses me, if anyone has any insight please chime in

Thanks
Scott

have you upgraded your video drivers lately? they are upgrading the hl2 engine all the time. also make sure you are playing on servers with low pings , its sounds like you are lagging out. i know some of the steam updates have caused lag and choke problems that are unrelated to your system.

The problem is I go to update my video driver and there is so many available updates I don't know which one is right for me... I am using a Radeon 9600 XT .

I play on servers with low pings all the time. There should be no reason for me to lag, my computer is still fairly new and I am using high speed internet. I have never had this problem up until that problem where an admin booted me out and then everything seemed to have went downhill from there. The thing is when I play CS Source now it doesn't lag like that... Just frustrating is all !

change your autosave files to readonly. worked for me..

i have a radeon 9600xt as well, with catalyst 5.8 drivers without any troubles. I find closing all programs and MORE than 512mb of ram helps considerably. 512 it's ok...but another chip past that makes it much smoother for me.

i found 5.9 catalyst drivers gave me harsh side effects with directx 9..so I reverted back to 5.8. 5.10 is out now, maybe I'll try that.

Invigor, how do I know which Catalyst I am running on right now? :redface: And how do I change my autosave files to readonly? hahaha

on the desktop: right click > click properties > settings tab > advanced button > options tab

should tell you in that window.

as for hl2 save files, they're located in:
C:\Steam\SteamApps\(youraccountname)\half-life 2\hl2\SAVE

or wherever you installed steam, should be 4 files.. autosave.sav, autosave.tga, autosave01.sav, autosave01.tga

highlight all 4, right click, click the "read only" button...click OK

voila.

only crappy side about it is don't die, or you go back to the beginning of the level..which in some levels is a LONG ways away

If the Official ATI drivers aren't working out try: http://www.omegadrivers.net/

These are optimized driver and usually contain more features than the ones released officially by ATI. Just be careful if you choose to play around with overclocking and advanced tweak settings... RTFM

When a game appears choppy like you describe, it is usually caused by something accessing the disk whether it be a steam update messing with your savegames or your virus scanner running in the background. This is of course, assuming that your connection is not lagging.

Anyway, it's probably a bug with the latest update, so expect another patch to fix that eventually. Valve likes to do their QA testing on their customers :rolleyes:.