Low-End Guide
Having trouble getting Half-Life 2 to run smoothly on your computer?
Then this guide is for you! We’ll help you get your game on whether your
problem is due to your hardware or your software. Read on!
Disk Defrag and Updates
There are two really basic things you should do on a monthly basis,
or at least a few times a year. One is defragmenting your hard drive(s)
and the other making sure your programs, drivers and operating system
are all up to date.
Disk Defrag is very easy to do, but depending on the size of your
drive and long it’s been since the last defragmentation, it could take
anywhere from a couple of minutes to hours or even all day! Go to the
control panel, select "Performance and Maintenance” and click the option
"Rearrange items on your hard disk to make programs run faster” to open
the disk defragmenter program. Select your drives one at a time to
defragment. Click "Analyze” and then the program will tell you if you
need to defragment or not. If it says you need to defragment and then
select that option.
A great time to defragment your computer is while you are at work or
sleeping, as it renders your system fairly useless while it is in the
process.
The other thing you need to do on a regular basis is check for
updates for pretty much everything on your computer. Steam takes care of
this for you as far as Half-Life and related games go and your
automatic updates for Windows should always be on (to take care of most
of the rest). Once a month check the Windows Update site
to see if there are any non-priority updates that the auto-updater
missed but you still want. You also want to check for updates to DirectX, your graphics card, your sound card and your motherboard (check their respective manufacturer's web sites).
But wait! Before you download that latest Windows security patch,
check out your computer manufacturer's web site first. HP Media Center
Pavilions, for example, need a special patch to be installed first,
otherwise things like their built-in TV tuner won't work and won't be
able to be fixed without doing a system reset. Also, invest in one of
those compressed air canisters. At least once a month, crack open your
desktop and blow out all the dust that's been building up in the exhaust
fans and on top of the peripherals.
Mozilla Firefox
If you are running Internet Explorer, you are needlessly suffering
from wading through hundreds of banner ads and pop-ups a day—simply
using Mozilla Firefox will solve this problem! There are many other
reasons to use it however, some of which you might not notice on the
surface but which will definitely affect your gaming in a positive
fashion. The problem is that Internet Explorer allows your computer to
download tracking cookies and spyware for all of those ads you see (like
"Slap Simon Cowell across the face to win a new ring tone!”), which in
turn slows down your computer—sometimes to a crawl!.
Download Mozilla Firefox
instead. It's going to replace Internet Explorer as your primary
internet browser. Don't worry about losing all of your favorites though,
because Firefox will import them as your bookmarks (along with your
cookies and other settings!). The layout is pretty much the same as IE,
except that the address bar takes up less room at the top of the page
and it gives you all kinds of special tools that you're going to love.
After you install it, you're going to want to tweak some options—in
particular your cookies. Go to the "Tools” menu, and at the bottom click
"Options.” In the window that opens up, click the "Privacy” tab and
open the "Cookies” branch. Select "Allow sites to set cookies,”
de-select "For the originating web site only,” and in the "Keep Cookies”
drop-down menu, select "Ask me every time.” Now every time you go to a
web site, it will ask you what cookies you want and what you don't, but
only for the first time you go there (unless you ever clean out the
exceptions). Cookies from the sites themselves, especially sites you go
to often or you're a member of should be allowed. If you ever
accidentally block a cookie that you need to log in and stay logged into
a site or use a site's features, you can always go back to the
exceptions list and unblock it.
Finding, Destroying, and Blocking Spyware
Firefox will only go so far—it will stop a lot of stuff from getting
onto your system but what about all of the junk already on your system?
That's where anti-spyware programs come in!
Spybot - Search & Destroy
is a free program that will go through your whole system searching for
spyware, listing it and asking you which of it you want to clean up. It
also gives you a brief bio on most of the things it finds, tells you how
you probably got them and what they're doing to your system. After you
clean the spyware out, you can immunize your system from everything that
it's set to discover and block it from ever coming back! The program
also comes with a built-in update feature. You should run it once a
month in this order: Update, Search
& Destroy, Immunize.
Spybot – Search & Destroy won’t solve all of your spyware problems by itself however. You'll also want to download SpywareBlaster and Lavasoft's
Ad-Aware as well. These programs will essentially do the same things as Spybot, but will find things that Spybot misses and vice-versa.
Another big resource-hog that may seem somewhat surprising is your
antivirus program. Both of the major brands—Norton and McAfee—are
bloatware and slow your computer down more than some of the viruses they
supposedly protect against! Ironically enough, the best antivirus
software is free! Planet Half-Life recommends using Avast Antivirus.
Make sure to uninstall your current antivirus program before installing
the new one—two antivirus programs running at once can really slow your
system down!
System Startup and Services
There are programs that sometimes are set to run on your computer in
the background to be non-invasive but are totally useless. These
programs may be legitimate, but they still are causing your system to
lag!
Here's a partial list of programs that could be doing this on your
computer right now: AOL Instant Messenger, WeatherBug, printer services,
QuickTime Task, iPod Helper, Adobe services and Creative services. In
addition, if you have a Dell, Compaq or the like, there could be
factory-installed startups running as well.
Tweaking your system startup and services are the way to deal with
this problem. Go to your "Start” menu and click "Run.” In the box that
pops up, type in "msconfig” to open the "System Configuration Utility.”
Under the "General” tab, the button "Selective Startup” should be
selected and everything under it should be selected as well. Go to the
"Services” tab, click the button to "Hide All Microsoft Services” and
turn off anything that’s left (unless it’s clearly a service for your
graphics card like "ATI Smart,” in which case leave it checked).
Now go to the Startup tab. Any items that are located in the
"Windows” folder you will want to keep and everything else can be turned
off (again, with the exception of things like your graphics card
services).
Just Before You Play
Right before you load up a new game you will want to close down any
other programs besides Steam that are running. Your instant messenger,
for example, can cause crashes quite easily—same for programs like
WeatherBug. Obviously, you shouldn't be doing anything like burning a cd
or running p2p software.
The last thing that you want to do is to go back to the "Start” menu,
select "Run” and this time type in "dxdiag.” This opens the "DirectX
Diagnostics Tool.” Go straight to the "Sound” tab. In the "DirectX
Features” section, there's a sliding option called "Hardware
Sound Acceleration Level” and it's probably set to "Full Acceleration.”
Turn it down all the way to "No Acceleration.” Don't forget to turn the
sound acceleration back to full if you want to watch any QuickTime
movies afterwards, because otherwise you won't get any sound out of them
at all.
Video Options In-Game
Now that you have configured your system to run the game at optimal
speeds, it’s time to tweak the game itself. Start Half-Life 2 up and go
to "Options” in the main menu. The first thing you will want to do is to
make sure that all of your graphic settings are set to the recommended
level or lower. Select the "Video” tab and click the "Advanced…” button.
Check each drop-down box one by one and make sure that each is set no
higher than the asterisked "recommended” setting.
Next, make sure that "HDR” is set to "None.” High Dynamic Range
lighting takes a lot of processing power and should only be used by
high-end systems. Chances are that your card doesn’t even support HDR
lighting though, in which case the box will be ghosted and set to "None”
by default.
Close the "Advanced” box, and make sure that your "Resolution” is set
to no higher than your desktop resolution. If you are still
experiencing poor performance, turning down the resolution can probably
help more than anything else. Also feel free to play around with the two
"Display Mode” options to see if either makes a difference.
If you have followed this guide step-by-step, you should see a marked
difference in the speed of your game! Now get started—the Resistance
needs you!
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