Half life 2 crashing on startup

I have a sony vaio vgn-s560p laptop with:
1.86 p-m
1.5 gigs of ram
geforce go 6400

i have played oblivion, fear, and doom 3 with no problems, but half life 2 keeps crashing on startup. it happens after the valve video, when it starts to show the fuzzy picture, but before it shows the rendured background. i get a blue screen for about a half a second, but it goes away too fast to read. i have tried updating the drivers for the GPU, does anyone have any other ideas? thnx.

 

Re-install the game, and if it still does it then, uninstall the game and steam, then re-install both of them.

 

Hate to tell ya tangent there is an issue with the 6400 in many vaios. I had one for a month or two and was experiencing blue screens in HL2 after about 10 minutes, and sometimes got blue screens in other games too. Googled it and my particular model and lo and behold got dozens of vaio users moaning about it.

You're lucky you can play other games - after an hour or so of playing BF2, UT2K4 and similar, mine always blue screened and restarted. Had to return it, as it affected all of the particular sony vaio model I owned. The store stopped selling them after that, so I got a better core duo laptop with a 7400 instead for free.

 

You're not the first Nvidia owner I heard complain about HL2 crashing on startup. A friend of mine has a desktop with a 7600GS, and we can't get HL2 or HL2: LC to run at all. We're thinking there is some issue with the rendered background because DOD: S and CS: S run fine, but they do not have rendered backgrounds.
I'm not sure if there is any way to disable that rendered background but that would probably be one solution.

 

To disable the fancy background when you load up HL2, go to the HL2 launch option in steam, right click, then go to properties, and Launch Options. In the box just type in;

+map_background none

and when the game loads, it'll skip the fancy background. You'll just see a blurred image of the scene it would have loaded up. Or alternatively you can type in -console and it'll go to the console.

Also to adjust your heapsize settings (equivalent of a paging file for HL2) in the launch options type in

-heapsize

followed by the amount (in bytes) you want HL2 to use as a heapsize file. This total should be no more than 50% of your total system memory. For an example, I use 512mb heapsize file when playing, so my launch options box says

-heapsize 512000

Mine is 512000, you might want to make it bigger or smaller depending on your total memory, so 256mb, you'd put in 256000, 128mb = 128000, 1gb = 1000000 etc. (hypermemory or turbocache users, deduct your GPU shared memory before working out the total)

 

Hmm, i tried that, but nothing changed after i typed that in, is there a way to know if it worked? the game still crashes on startup.

is there a way to keep the blue screen error up for longer then a split second? all i have been able to see was "graphics card" and "bios memory"