All Hl Games/mods Keep Crashing

X_Stickman

<div class="IPBDescription">After about 1/2 hours play</div> At first, it was just random crashes, about 1 a week or so. Fair 'nuff, my computer isn't that good. After it crashed, i needed to restart to be able to run any .exe file, as if i tried without restarting, it would give the Illegal Operation error, and not work.
This has gradualy become more frequent (dispite about 4 formats, not just because of this, other problems as well), untill it will play about 1/2 hour max before crashing. But now, instead of just crashing to desktop (as it did before) it will come up with the illegal operation error over the top of the game, crash the game, and just generaly annoy me. Also, it will randomly freeze, while playing the last second of sound over and over and over.

Personaly, i think my computer has developed intelligence, and it hates me.

Any thoughts/ideas?

Thansal

umm, I sorya doubt that we will be able to help you, but here is what we need you to do:

FULL system specs
Make sure both Drivers and Windows updater are up to date.
Does this problem happen with anything else? (or just HL? do you play any other games?)
I want you to bring up the task manager (cntrl alt del) and try and kill any non esential proceses (the second tab in the control panel).
When HL crashes open up the controll panel again and look for oddities (like hl.exe still runing or anyhing)

Set up a fire wall, run a virus scan, and run ad aware
<a href='http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp' target='_blank'>Zona Alarm</a> <a href='http://housecall.trendmicro.com/' target='_blank'>Hosecall</a> <a href='http://www.lavasoftusa.com/' target='_blank'>adaware</a>

so get back to us (we need you to be as through as possible b/c you are our eyes, ears, and hands)

Nil_IQ

I had a similar problem (and I still AM having this problem with NS, just not with regular HL anymore), and my solution was to defrag my drive. If you formatted the drive I can't see why you SHOULD need to defrag as well, but its worth a try.

Also note you will have to re-install HL after defragging before it will work.

devicenull

My guess would either be a virus/trojan or spy(ad)ware. Ad-Aware is good, but I've found <a href='http://spybot.safer-networking.de/' target='_blank'>SpyBot S&D</a> works well too, because the free version can be configured to scan on system start.. takes 2 min and you can do other things while it scans.
Did you make any changes before it started crashing? Added hardware?
What were the other problems you formatted for?
Does the illegal operation have the program that caused it?

I really don't think defragging could do anything, but try it. Also scandisk might be better..

Infinity

its almost like windows somehow invents new bugs

"Omg TEH SENTIENT PROGRAM!"

devicenull

<!--QuoteBegin--Infinity+Jul 1 2003, 06:10 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Infinity @ Jul 1 2003, 06:10 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> its almost like windows somehow invents new bugs

"Omg TEH SENTIENT PROGRAM!" <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yea, but that would mean that windows was semi-well-programmed.. and its not...