New Asus G1S (169.09 drivers): "Hellgate London stopped working"

I know this game was supposedly released in a very buggy state, but after getting past the first hurdle - installing an MS update that fixed some kind of "virtual space allocation" problem - and managing to launch the game two or three times, playing for a bit, it now seems impossible to launch Hellgate London anymore (except for one more time last night, using Windows XP compatability mode, but judging by my results just now, that was just a fluke).

Each and every time the game gets to the first logo screen and then crashes to desktop with a "Hellgate London stopped working". One time I got a memory error of some sort as well, but otherwise nothing.

I got the laptop yesterday, and it should be fully up to date with all Vista updates, and the video card drivers updated to the latest 169.09 version.
I've seen no other indications that the system is running less than flawless - particularly after I've combed through the startup services and weeded out a few things (and turning Windows Search off was pure bliss, that was a recipe for a whole lot of harddriver trashing).

I've yet to try out any other games, but I will today. Just heading into town now and I plan on picking up The Witcher - and I will probably give it a shot with a couple of other games I've got lying around.

Anyone with similar problems? I was really looking forward to playing this game .

Edit: Oh, and I can't seem to log into the official Hellgate forums - it just refuses my login name and password though I've triple checked them. The Flagship Studios forums doesn't seem to have much in the area of technical support.

 

Just tried again and got a specific error (paraphrasing, my memory isn't what it used to be ).

"The instruction at [some address] tried to access memory at [some other address]. Memory couldn't be read".

 

I'm not going to lie, Hellgate is an extremely bad game from a technical standpoint with all the bugs they released it with. It is NOT right for a commercial game to have the bug level it has.

That being said, try a reinstall of the game and maybe try removing ram sticks one at a time to see if one was bad (assuming u have 2+ gigs of ram) by running the game and seeing if one allows a lunch and the other doesnt.

Also, I use 169.01 drivers and those work fine for hellgate so that might also help you out.

 

That's a little further than I'm willing to go with a brandnew laptop just to try to get a game working. And besides, I only got 2 GB, and I don't think I would like running Vista on just one .

Considering the memory error I doubt this is a graphics card driver related problem, but I might give it a shot.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions - in worst case scenario I guess I'll just have to wait a few weeks, or months, until they've patched it up properly, assuming they do.
Right now I've just come home with The Witcher (let's hope that doesn't end up causing headaches as well) and Assassin's Creed for my XBox 360 - so I should have enough entertainment for a while. And then Mass Effect is out next Friday .

Two weeks ago I was pretty much ready to give up on PC gaming entirely and just stick to consoles, but there are still too many current and upcoming PC games I would really like to play. Hellgate was one of them - sadly .

 

i gotta say - i installed the 169.09 drivers last nite on my asus g1s-x1 - and my 3dmark scores went down - a LOT

heres the breakdown...

with stock asus drivers:
- 3dmark05 - ~7400
- 3dmark06 - 3773

with 169.09:
- 3dmark05 - ~6600 (!)
- 3dmark06 - 3743

i then tried 169.04 and was VERY pleasantly surprised:
- 3dmark05 - ~8100 (!)
- 3dmark06 - ~3900

i think ill try out 169.01 and 169.02 tonite - but i doubt ill get any higher than those 169.04 numbers...

 

I'm downloading 3DMark06 now - but I must admit that my patience with PC gaming and hardware these days, doesn't really stretch to daily or weekly driver updates and tests.
Those six hours I spent yesterday getting Vista up and running as it should, tweaking and updating it, plus installing applications and migrating work, mail and a ton of other things from my old computer (and I'm not done yet), is something I really don't enjoy nearly as much as I did five or ten years ago - the only thing that made it a bit more interesting this time was all the new nifty Vista features (I've been using Windows 2000 for the last six years).
I just want something that - more or less - works, but I guess that's often too much to hope for .

Well, at least The Witcher appears to run fine - though performance is admittedly a bit disappointing coming from a (dead) desktop PC with a similar CPU and RAM but a more powerful graphics card (7900 GTO).
But I guess that's what I bought that XBox 360 for anyway two months ago .