Source Games Crashing with Looping Sounds

Hi, being my first post on the forums, I'd like to say a quick hello
Hello!

Before I begin, I know this is a very common problem for people who own source engine games (HL2, CS:S, TF2, etc) and I have read extensively about it. After trying multiple "fixes" I thought I'd come to this forum to ask people who own close to the exact same hardware about the issue.

Now, when I play Day of Defeat Source, Nightmare House 2 (mod) and a few other mods (I assume this happens with CS:S and HL2 even though I haven't played them on this machine yet), after about 15 mins-1 hour, the game crashes with looping sounds. Sometimes I am able to close the game, but the process continues to run and can't be killed. This forces me to do a hard reset regardless because it takes literally forever to shut down.

Anyway, I've tried the paged pool fix in which you go into regedit and change some hexadecimal/decimal values. I've also tried setting different values for my Virtual Memory through control panel (I used 256-2048). As well as this, I tried running as admin and running all the programs in compatibility mode.

Now that leads to my actual question. Having received my M11X on Tuesday, it's still pretty new. I upgraded my nVidia driver to 260.99 I believe, flashed my bios from the dell website and that's about it. Are there other programs/processes, etc getting in the way?

If you need it, I'm happy to give extra info in case I left anything out. Thanks in advance.

On a happier note, I'm loving this little machine. It makes Oblivion and STALKER cry, which are both games I really love and had in mind when I purchased the computer. Anyway, help will be appreciated, even if you can just point me in a better direction

P.S. My M11X is the R2, with an i7, 4gb RAM and a 500gb HDD. Nearly left that out

 

One thing I might suggest is disabling all programs and services (non-Microsoft, anyway) from start-up under MsConfig. Then, you could enable one at a time, which is a rather tedious process, to find the culprit.

Let me know if that helped!

 

J.P.'s suggestion is good advice. However, there's a slightly more efficient way to narrow down a troublesome startup service.

1. First, disable all non-essential processes as J.P. recommends. IF that improves things then move on to step 2. If there's no improvement then you're looking at some other problem.

2. Since you established that disabling all non-essential processes alleviates the problem you were having then finding the culprit is easiest if you start dividing your choices in order to find it. Looking at all of the startup items that you've disabled in step one, now you want to enable half of those and reboot. Problem still not present? That means that problem is with one of the items still disabled. Conversely, if the problem reappears then it was one of the items that you just re-enabled.

Keep dividing things in half in this manner and you'll find your problematic service much faster than if you disable them all and re-enable one at a time.

Divide and conquer!

 

it sounds like you might have this problem:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-geoforce-gt-335m-causes-game-crashes-12.html

samething happens to me whenever i play l4d2 or cs:s

 

Great, thanks for the quick replies very much everyone. First I'll try narrowing down the start up processes (I assume I can't accidentally disable an essential program and can't reverse it), and see if anything is causing a problem.

But that link to another thread sounds very much like the problem I'm having with the source games. I can play BF2 (not BC2, the original BF2), Oblivion, and STALKER all fine for hours on end perfectly, but when I try to play anything from source, crash.

So if disabling the processes to narrow one down fails, I'll keep following that threat until someone posts a driver fix or something

Thanks again, I'll keep you posted.

 

Please continue posting in the thread f3lic linked to.

Thanks.