running games from steam

Hi guys
im running a Nexus/m860tu/np8660 with p9500, 4gb ram, 9800gt

just bought 5 games in the steam sale for £21.85
just tested them to make sure they run ok and so far 1 of them freezes on the opening screen even though the music is still playing. have to turn off at mains button. after re boot the screen setup is on its lowest and stuck on 800x600
i thought after re boot it would have reverted back to its original setting of 1680x1050
the game causing the problem is rainbow six vegas (not 2). it checks for updates on startup and says there arent any so it doesnt need new or updated drivers. at least on my third attempt it lets me go to task manager and it is still running in there but at least i can close it down from there instead of a power off.
any ideas people
cheers

 

I know you don't specifically need newer drivers, but you could always download the new mobile drivers from Nvidia's website, at least so you can get the PhysX hardware acceleration enabled along with CUDA functionality.

Otherwise, try running Steam as an administrator (right click on the Steam.exe (not shortcut), select run as administrator. See if that helps at all.

 

cheers storm
already running as admin and all other games load fine including rainbow six 3 gold, far cry, attack on pearl harbour & alpha prime.
ill have a go with the new nvidia driver even though i have no idea what the PhysX and CUDA do

this is the screen im stuck on. just left it for 15 minutes and the music plays all the way through but no movement.

 

I'm picking through this forum on the Steam forums to see if I can help you:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=402

Try turning off the steam overlay in Steam: File > Settings > In-Game > uncheck 'Enable Steam Community In-Game'.

If that doesn't work, maybe try verifying the game files (right click on the game in your games list and click properties, it's on one of the tabs that will show up). If that doesn't work, maybe try deleting the game files and re-downloading. If you do redownload, try turning off your anti-virus during the download and first test run, sometimes anti-virus will delete .exe and .dat files downloaded on Steam without you knowing it, breaking the game.

PhysX is a physics engine that many games use, the main competitor to the Havok physics engine. Havok is in games such as Half-Life 2. PhysX is also in a lot of games, some of them have certain features enabled that will allow your Nvidia GPU to offload the physics processing from your CPU, improving physics effects and performance. The list of titles that support this isn't very long, but it is a neat thing to have (Unreal 3 and Mirror's Edge are the only two I can think of right now). The CUDA part of the driver will allow new applications that utilize the GPU to process data to function. Photoshop CS4, for instance, can zoom and rotate massive images in real time using this feature (when on the CPU it can take a lag time of many seconds). So while these features may not impact you right now, you might as well have them included in your driver, you technically pay for the features when you get an Nvidia GPU.

Also, the new mobile driver on Nvidia's website should maximize performance while preserving all the mobile features of your GPU that can sometimes be disabled using laptopvideo2go.com drivers.

 

StormEffect you are a star. above sorted it out and game plays fine now.
thank you so much. + 1 rep for your time.

what does the above actually do. is it just for communication between players in multi player.

 

You can try it out yourself, turn it back on and load up Far Cry or something (I'm not sure it is supported in Far Cry, if it isn't you can try Alpha Prime or something), then, once you are inside the game and playing or at a menu, press Shift + TAB. This will bring up the Steam overlay, allowing you to access the Steam community browser, friends list, and Steam chat system without needing to leave the game. I've tried running games like Warcraft 3 through steam, and the overlay allows me to chat with my buddies while in-game with them without using the cumbersome battlenet chat. It's actually kind of fun, but it doesn't work with EVERY game on Steam.

This is the first time I've ever heard of the overlay actually breaking a game though, not good!

 

just backing up all my games first. on GTA IV so about another 15 minutes to go. dont know why im bothering backing gta up as i dont like the game and cant see myself playing it much.

thers always a first time the overlay broke and it had to be with me,lol.

thanks once again for your help and advice.

 

Does backing up the game allow u to play the game without being connected to the internet?

 

good question. im not sure so ill give it a go now.


edit.

after turning off wifi i tried to load from backup folder on external hard drive. off course steam tried to load and said failed but then gave the option to load off line so i clicked it and it tried to load alpha prime again. so naticus, it looks like it may work and load off line. i suppose the newer games might have some protection to stop this from happening. interesting though.

 

If I recall, when I restored Steam backups I still needed to actually run Steam to get it working (though it might be possible to do it all in offline mode, meaning no internet connection is necessary). Just be careful with the backups, generally you want to keep it all nicely contained, it should create some sort of .exe file or something in the backup directory that extracts the games into steam when you want it restored. Otherwise you have to jump through hoops to restore it.