Team Fortress 2 Freezing issues

Eh.

I've had this laptop since around October of last year. I've had Team Fortress 2 since earlier in the year. I played the game without incident on a Dell Desktop system running XP. I have not been so lucky on my XPS system.

I am running a dell XPS M1530 with a 8500M. I have posted on other forums, such as GameFAQs, and have found at least one other person, perhaps two, with the same computer, and the same issue.

The issue is that sometimes (and it varies from day to day, time to time) the game will freeze with a looping sound at the blackboard (it's the blackboard screen, but the blackboard doesn't load before the game freezes). I don't think that this is a paged pool memory problem, because I had that problem on the XP system and windows threw me an error message when it happened. Such is not happening now, and it's a freeze, not a crash. The game will stutter when it hits the blackboard, then just seize up entirely, requiring a Ctrl/Alt/Delete to get out of.

However, sometimes my system manages to squeeze through this problem and run the game. Other times I manage to get past the blackboard for a couple seconds before it seizes up. Other times entirely, the problem just doesn't occur and the game runs perfectly, only to seize up when the server that I'm playing on loads up the next map.

To give you a percentage of how often my game runs fine, this morning I tried to run the game and it took 5 attempts to actually get into a game. It is not a server issue, as I encounter it on all servers that I join.

Other times, my computer seems to be free of this problem. A few weeks ago I managed to play numerous games in a row without the game freezing at all. However, after resetting my machine, the problem came back.


One of the other people that says they have this issue say that they actually cannot play the game, as it freezes every single time.



I have tried numerous things to fix this, and none have seemed to work. My drivers are up to date, my BIOS is up to date (unless there was a new version in the last month or so), Internet Explorer is up to date, and I don't have any other outstanding issues.




On another, possibly unrelated note, I had someone come in and replace my keyboard today. He ran a systems diagnostic and found that there was an error with my hard drive. However, aside from this problem, I have not had any other problems with my computer, aside from a large overheating issue I had a few months ago (which I fixed by blowing into the air vent every few days to vent the dust out, along with replacing the graphics card and the heat sink).



Note that this problem only seems to occur in Team Fortress 2. I have not encountered it in Left 4 Dead, or any of my source mod games (though I admit, I haven't played any source mod games lately).



Could anyone give me some tips?

Thanks for your time in advance.

 

I have and still do encounter this same issue. From what I can tell is that it has to do with the information that is pulled up at the blackboard screen. Depending on the servers website and what it pulls will cause the game to freeze. I havent found any reason to why some servers work and other dont but I do know that is the problem.

Try going to server name SourceOP and it should work just fine.

Hope this help.

 

the thing is, some servers work some of the time, some work most of the time, and others never seem to work. Others are just day to day. :\

 

Well:

tl;dr: The game freezes when it joins a server and is at the Message Of The Day screen.

Since nobody here seems to know what to do, can someone tell me where else I could attempt to go for help?

 

Bump, this is a problem I encounter as well.