So. Hulk decides Half Life 2 looks good. Hulk sees buddies at work playing. Hulk LIKES. Lots of shooting, Hulk can smash things, blow things up, throw barrels and crates, and Hulk likes to stay up late at night in dark with headphones and get scared by games with evil aliens.
Hulk buys Half Life 2 - downloads from steam.
Hulk has decent laptop: Dell Inspiron 8200, 1.8GHz, 768MB Ram, 7200RPM Hard Drive, 32MB NVidia GeForce4 440 GO video card. This is no longer dream machine, but good enough for Hulk.
Hulk begins game. Intro with GMan video sequence so bad Hulk wants to smash something. Intro video sequence stutters and skips. Hulk decides to endure, seeing reports of stuttery video on steam's site. After enduring 10 minutes of a 2 minute opening video sequence Hulk is finally able to play. Hulk is amazed by how well game works, how gripping story line is...
Then Hulk's computer throws blue screen of death.
Hulk remembers that HL2 warned Hulk of outdated video drivers before launching. Hulk goes to NVidia site, gets unified drivers, installs. Hulk reboots. Hulk still gets outdated video drivers warning when launching HL2. Hulk checks. Sure enough, drivers still same version. Hmmmmm. Hulk tries again. Same sad story for Hulk.
Hulk tries Dell site. Hulk has latest drivers from Dell, but Hulk's drivers are almost 18 months old
Hulk tries to remove drivers from hardware manager. No worky. Goes to safe mode to remove drivers. Works. Tries to install Unified NVidia drivers. Reboots. Drivers not there
Hulk ANGRY now. Hulk knows Nvidia good. Dell good. But NVidia + Dell = EVIL. Hulk thinks: evil, proprietary drivers. Evil plot to stop Hulk from getting good drivers.
Hulk's brother tells Hulk to get haxored drivers made by l33t gamerz. Hulk looks on web (Hulk loves google). Hulk finds site, with stockpiles of forbidden drivers. After searching for 'laptop' and some other word, Hulk finds drivers written by new superhero: Omega Drivers.
Hulk happy, because drivers say they will go onto ANY NVidia card, even laptops.
Hulk gets Nvidia NastyFileRemover from guru3d.com, and removes all shreds of old, evil drivers supplied by Windows XP and Dell.
Then Hulk installs Omega Drivers.
Wohooo. New drivers take. Everything is good. No bad warning from HL2 when launching. Game plays great. No longer throws BSOD in the exact spot that it was ALWAYS throwing BSOD.
LOL! Glad you got it working. I told ya to get the catalyst drivers because I thought you had an ATI card, not NVidia. But you're right: OEM drivers BAD. The Omega ones have good reviews. You may be able to use RivaTuner (also @ Guru3D) that may let you tweak things with your video card. Also, to get better performance, you may be able to force different directx versions. You can force it into dx7, 8, or 9, depending on performance and what your card supports. Brian
Posted by: Brian | November 27, 2004 at 07:27 PM
Thanks a lot for great instructions!!
I'm trying to run Half Life2 on my dell insp 8200 with nvidia 440 go, and it doesn't work at all! I hope that will help!!!
Posted by: volosator niibacca | May 14, 2006 at 11:56 AM