[Gene]

I'm posting on behalf of a friend whom I gave FS2 (same version I have, that is HOTU version with all the extra files installed, plus open source installation present).

When he runs the game, it functions reasonably well. On high in-game settings and medium opensource settings, there is almost no lag.

Until at a specific point in game, it simply hangs. Screen image freezes, nothing responds in game, Windows doesn't respond either, only way to exit is reset.

Twice this has occured in the second mission, at the second the covrette launched it's energy beams (first time in game), but other times at random points of intensive battle.

I reduced graphical settings to absolute minimum, both in-game and in launcher. That seemed to prolong the period of game working, but sooner or later it still freezes.

I beleive the cause is memory shortage or other resource shortage problem. The thing is that the game displayed no symptoms of resource problems (no slowdown or errors), but simply freezes at a point, leads me to beleive either the game or the friend's system uses it's resources well while they last, but does a poor job at swapping memory and freeing up resources.

I'm not sure if my theory is correct however.

These are the specs of my friend's system:

Pentium 4 2.2Ghz
256MB RAM
Radeon graphics card, 64MB video memory
Windows XP Home Edition, SP2, DirectX10

The game runs on the open source launcher (launcher 5.2, installation 3.6), with no extra flags checked.

BTW: I went into the Windows Virtual Memory manager, and tried increasing virtual memory limits up to 10GB, that didn't solve the problem (nor had any effect in game I could notice).

Can anyone please help fix this problem of game freezing? I run the exact same copy on my computer, and it has no problems whatsoever. My computer is the same as my friend's, except it has 512 RAM and a 128MB TNT3 videocard.

[Hippo]

What Radeon card, and what catalyst? I have that happen every so often with the newest catylist on a 9700...

[Trivial Psychic]

If you're running your AGP speed at full, try dropping it back a setting.  I find this improves stability and got around any hanging I was experiencing.

[Gene]

How do I change AGP settings?

I'll have to ask my friend for the exact Radeon model

[Trivial Psychic]

*Grumbles about being the 2nd time I've had to explain this in a week*

OK, go to your display options screen, either by right-clicking on the destop, or through your hardware manager in the control pannel.  Select the Settings tab and then select the Advanced option.  If you're using any recent form of Cat drivers, the option you want should be under the SMARTGART tab.  You should then see a slider bar under the header of AGP Settings.  If this is maxed out at 4 or 8, drop if back to 2 or 4 respectively.  Then all you have to do is save your changes (which will probably require a reboot) and you're set.  You shouldn't notice any performance loss with this change.

Later!