Laptop Crashes when playing Portal or Team Fortress 2 (Tried a ton of things, input appreciated)

Alright, I'm running off an HP Pavillion zv6000 laptop, had it for about a year and a half now.

After downloading Portal and TF2, my computer would randomly crash (Giving me some for of weird blue screen with a bunch of white lines going across the screen, before it finally shut down and restarted) during the game. I've never had this kind of issue before, and can run games like CS: Source perfectly with not crashing or anything.

So thinking my computer needed to be cleaned, I reformatted and started fresh. Downloaded everything again, and the same problems occurred. Steam keeps telling me that my drivers are outdated, and i should get new ones. (This was the message that I've always gotten) Windows also said there was a problem with my Video drivers after recovering from a serious error.

Today I downloaded the new ATI Catalyst Drivers (7.1 I believe, I'm not sure exactly) and Steam stopped giving me the "You need to update your drivers" message, and I assumed that everything was alright now. I was wrong, and my computer will still crash when trying to play both games. I tried lowering all the settings on TF2, running it in a window, etc, and still I crash. And now when I recover from a crash, Windows says the information was corrupted when checking to see why I crashed, and all that.

Sorry for the lengthy explanation, but I thought I'd give you a background on my problem. Any suggestions to stop this crashing? I can't doubt that Portal or TF2 are force much more requirements than Source, but I could be wrong. Any input would be nice. Here are my specs:

HP Pavillion zv 6000
Windows XP
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 6400+
ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 series graphics card.

I'm not used to giving out my information for help, so if anyone could use any more information let me know and I'll update.

Thank you for all your help! I appreciate any feedback.

 

I believe the newest catalyst is 7.9, is that the one you have?

 

Actually, I think it is 7.9. When my friend showed me the link, and I saw the notes, it was released today, apparently. I'm almost positive it's the most up-to-date version.

 

had the same problem with the lines and stuff and the crashing... but its odd because it'll only do it once ina while now and it ONLY did it on 2fort for TF2.. luckily it hasn't done it today

 

I have the same problem with Portal on my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1650G laptop.

First I used the ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 (v. 6.14.10.6525) drivers that is the latest on Fujitsu-Siemens' website.
Portal then crashed about 5 minutes into the game (the 2nd room).

I then upgraded to the latest Catalyst drivers (v7.10, 7-10-igp_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_sb_gart_enu_53250.exe) from the http://game.amd.com website.
Portal now crashes a couple of minutes into the loading screen (the blurry in-game screen, before the main menu appears).

If you manage to solve this, please let me know!

 

I didn't read the whole thing but, my friend has a laptop with your graphics and Portal crashed he started it, wouldn't even load. However, he forced dx8 and it worked great, but looked like crap

 

Seems to be a lot of crash issues with the new Source games, check Valve's support list:

http://support.steampowered.com/cgi...=answers.search_nl&p_search_text=portal+crash

 

I've got the same annoying issue...and I kinda found a way around it.
v2000z: 1.6 Sempron, 1.5 gb memory, 200m xpress

The games run pretty good considering, but first you need to grab some older drivers (I did anyway, if anyone else has a better solution please tell me!), I believe the last drivers that actually worked on the 200m were 6.5. That should let you run the games (It's a problem with the 3Dness of the games I think, because the 2D TF2 title screen loaded fine while the 3D Portal screen caused the BOSD). Next, in Portal I have to set "Portal depth" to 1 for it to work right. This means you'll only get one set of portals, which isn't that great so tell me if you find a better solution! At least you should be able to play now.

EDIT: Also, you can run games fine in a window with the latest version of the drivers. But full screen breaks it. Go figure.

 

I hate crashes... Happens all the time to me w/Far Cry and I just can't seem to figure out the issue.

 

Setting the setting:

-dxlevel 80

...in the game launch settings in Steam seems to have done the trick for me!

 

I upgraded to these Catalyst drivers as well and I get the same problem. It crashes while loading.

Same thing happens for TF2 on occasion. Sometimes I can play for 15 minutes, sometimes for about 2 hours. Sometimes just the loading screen.

Thanks for all your feedback btw.

 

Yeah, mine crashes with a blue screen of death and my computer cold boots. It has something to do with VALVE purposely building poorly compatible software, then selling it to everyone saying that it's a good thing. I bought the sole TF2 package (solely for TF2), I tried many things, -dxlevel 80 -dxlevel 81 -dxlevel 90 -window -dev, and some other freaky settings some people suggested might fix it because it worked for "them".

Nothing's worked. TF2 for my computer probably won't be playable until they update it correctly. The big problems have something to do with one of three things:
a) AMD processors aren't supported very well.
b) Dual processors aren't supported well enough.
c) Integrated graphics cards aren't as compatible as non-integrated graphics cards.

I have a ACER 5050-5554 and I've had problems with valve software.

 

Hello,
I have an ati x200m as well. I'm a computer scientist from Windsor, and i happen to have a lot of experience with what your talking about.

To put it bluntly, ati's drivers are absolute **** right now for their older line of cards. I've seen better performance from the new drivers they just wrote for linux with xgl support right now than for the catalyst 7.9 series (even though they're still buggy in the linux one).

I can say with 100% confidence that the random crashes are because all of steam's games that use the (1) new source 2007 engine WILL crash with the (2) x200m and (3) ati's latest drivers.

Source 2007 games include:
Portal,
TF2,
HL2 EP2 (to name a few popular ones... can't remember any more right now)

Furthermore, one incident I have SPECIFICALLY seen is the crashes happening when reflective water is shown, despite how much you change the refleciton settings. It's the second that water is on-screen. --> THIS IS WITH THE LATEST/ CLOSE-TO LATEST ATI DRIVERS FOR THE X200M

I've been using ati's 21/11/2006 driver Internal Version v. 8.321.0.0 WITHOUT the catalyst system. You have to realize what catalyst is... it runs on the cpu and NOT on the GPU, making it only a bottleneck to your otherwise higher framerates. (and yes, you can install without them, everything will STILL work just fine. Ati's just riding their lazy asses on mirosoft's .net programming and a buncha half-compiled code to control some extra settings on the gpu that really just clash/do the same thing as any in-game settings you use).

With the 21/11/2006 driver Internal Version v. 8.321.0.0 :
Unfortunately, I have still seen issues with the drivers I'm using. The source 2007 games no-longer crashes, but at a cost that some TEXTURES just don't load (so instead where textures should be, the unmarked textures simply doesn't refresh, and whatever textures were adjacent to the missing ones just "smear" through it with every frame). It's difficult to picture, but just imagine where textures are not loaded , its not black, its like smeared graphics. I see this PARTICULARILY with textures in levels/maps with water.

As for who's fault this is, i really can't say. Valve needs to be confronted with this issue (because the card CAN play the game on low graphics settings). But for now your best bet is to uninstall your current ati software, including catalyst and the display driveres, and use Catalyst 7.3 , Internal driver version 8.351 March 28, 2007, WITHOUT catalyst. You WILL get better framerates and performance in ALL your software. In general i actually recommend everyone with the x200m use this version in windows, since the newer ones don't exactly introduce anything better (sometimes they just bring more bugs... i once saw an x200m draw every circle as a square with one driver version!).

Anywho, good luck to all! Hope this helps!

p.s. ... there's GOTTA be a better way to sign up to these sites without having to register all the time... why not have like ONE account with ONE reputation all over the internet? I could see that working VERY well for responsibilities and quick bans etc.

 

I am running a ATI Radeon 9800 pro 256 MB. well radeon 9800 and 256 MB for sure. Anyways I could play HL2 np but I couldn't get portal for HL2 to start for nothing. It would always freeze on the startup screen when it was still fuzzy and I left it there for 30 minutes. Well I figured out the problem. I found the startup icon for Portal and right clicked it. Then I went to properties and in the field where it says "target" it says "C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -applaunch 400" so I added "-dxlevel 80" to that line so now it says this, "C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -applaunch 400 -dxlevel 80". what this does is it forces directx level 8 instead of directx 9. now it runs beatiful np. Some one else recomended using "-dxlevel 81" for directx 8.1. I don't know if that will make a difference but that was my problem and not the v3 inability of my card (at least not that im aware of.). Hope this helps some of you guys trying to figure this out. Sure helped me.

PS this directory is for those of you using Steam. I found it in my startup menu with all the programs under steam. For those of you using a normal install just find the shortcut you click to turn on your portal game and edit that.