I hard locked one time on Friday, but otherwise have had no issues. Shiny was having issues with her game hitching from time to time, but overall she was doing ok.

Well in L4D2 defence i can say that i had X3 terran conflict running for 10ish hours before jumping into the game (Its the kind of game that one can leave running while doing other stuff, for instance while the game was running there was a family get together on my grandpa birthday). So my guess is that the resources were thin to begin with which might have caused some problems. Also i am using quite old Nvidia drivers since, I think it was the 194, some releases have caused black screen on boot problems.

Spoof of the L4D2 achievement fever

http://www.firstpersonobserver.com/?p=80

Luckily we don't play too much with random achievement whores, but oh so recognizable.

Apparently the realism versus mutation is really good guys. And since you can do 'team matching' as of late it might be worth trying to team up against another squad. That or we play mostly SS2 and hold out for the Chainsaw Massacre mutation next weekend.

Well i reinstalled L4d2 and also pulled down the shader settings to medium, i hope it will help with the random loops and disconnects. However the game is fairly easy on the pc so the problem is not with the lack of oomph, rather somekind of mess Valve cooked up in the Source engine. I read on the forums that gt2+ series have bigger issues with Shaders at high and very high settings.

I got rid of the loops and was reimbursed with engine errors.

Well, left 4 dead 2 is officially broken for me, i did a full video driver reinstall and i used driver sweeper too and it still crashes randomly. So no L4D2 before valve gets off its ass and starts fixing it.

god damn. that sucks hard.

you obviously deleted the game and re-installed it?

And other games run fine, I take it? Bizarre. The engine errors would lean me toward either graphics card or directx problems....but if other games work fine, that can't really be it. Besides ripping motherboard drivers and your graphics card and reinstalling it all (and I know you already did the gfx card), a full windows reinstall is about all I could think of. Sorry bro, that sucks... I've been there, I completely understand how frustrating it can be.

Well it seems to be specifically a problem with the 8800 series cards. On valve forums i found a thread where lots of people who own every variation of the 8800 series have a similar problem. And there are people who have commented in that topic that their 8800 works just fine. So go figure what the F is the problem.

Well i did some price research and i could get a gts250 for about $130 new and 9800gt for around $90 used. I was hoping to go for SLI when the pc runs out of oomph but whats the use of extra FPS when i cant play the most important game. So a forced up(side)grade is upon me, booo.

That sounds fine.

@Peltz - I have an 8800gt, and my chick has a 9800gt (practically the same card). Neither of us has issues like you. *shrug* Btw, I'd go with Ati if I were buying a new card right now. Just saying.

@Ox - freezing up with squares in the corner (ie, graphical artifacts) typically implies a graphics card problem. Freezing in a menu... blah... there are a couple ways to do 2d menus in directx, but they typically involve switching to a 2d mode. I wouldn't be surprised if a different pipeline on the graphics card handled that.... and maybe that pipeline is having issues. If it takes a couple minutes, maybe it's heat damage.

Sounds like Peltz should send you his old graphics card.

Yeah, I think it's something like that. The fact that it happens mostly in older games, static screens (loading screens etc) and menu's would suggest that. Still, pretty lame problem, since it's pretty risky to bring in a perfectly working graphics card for newer games just to fix that. Otoh, you never know in which games you're gonna have problems. Ah well.

I switched to even older drivers, i can now play longer but CDT is still inevitable. On some occasions the game has no sounds what so ever and they only return if i restart the client, change of map does not help. However the longest time i managed to play without CDT was without any sounds which makes realism mode impossible to play.