FEAR PC issue: "Out of Memory"

[Sevs753]

The problem has been solved. see last post for my solution

to start out, here are my computers specs. let me know if you need more than this. its a desktop btw, so none of theres are "mobile" variants.
-AMD Athlon X2 4200+ 2.2GHz dual core processor
-2Gb Ram
-EVGA NVidia GeForce 8600 GT (256mb memory)
-Windows Vista SP2 with all updates

Ive been playing FEAR (v1.08) the past few days with no problem. right now i'm in interval 9. i just got to the part where i drop into the "vault". problem is, when the loading page appears, it loads about 25% of the way and then i hear one of the windows pings. the game doesnt load anymore and alt+tab doesnt work. inorder to get out of it, i have to do ctrl+alt+del and show the task manager.

the task manager shows that fear is taking about 415mb of ram (at one point a few days ago, it was using over 1gb of my ram) and about 50% of my physical memory is being used. when i try to go back into fear, a little box pops up that simply says "out of memory". and when i hit ok, the game just quits. i can still load up the game and load and play my last save perfectly fine. the problem only occurs when i try to advance to the next chapter.

i've tried turning all extra effects off and lowering the resolution to the lowest possible and the problem still persists.

what i'm wondering is: is there a way to fix this without upgrading my computer? and would reformatting my computer and installing windows xp solve the problem?

fyi, this is a brand new installation of vista so there's nothing to lose by reformatting. and i want to point out, this is in the original F.E.A.R game. not F.E.A.R 2.

[73GMCSprint]

Are there any newer patches for the game than what you have now?

How about video card drivers? How old are yours?

As far as hardware goes, you should be running OK with what you have (and apparently you are except for this one spot), unless there's something faulty.

[Sevs753]

Originally Posted by 73GMCSprint

Are there any newer patches for the game than what you have now?

1.08 is the latest version and i have that version.

Originally Posted by 73GMCSprint

How about video card drivers? How old are yours?

when i was reformatting the computer a few days ago, the computer freezes when using the driver CD so i downloaded the drivers from Nvidias site. they were a "general driver" for the 8/9 series but that was all i could find. so as far as i know, they;re the latest ones.

Originally Posted by 73GMCSprint

As far as hardware goes, you should be running OK with what you have (and apparently you are except for this one spot), unless there's something faulty.

everything else runs fine including other games (like Halo 2. sue me, im just now getting into PC games. i usually play on the 360. also, dont ask me why i dont play this on the 360. i dont know why myself. lol)

[73GMCSprint]

Maybe you are just out of memory.

What's your pagefile set to?

[Sevs753]

Originally Posted by 73GMCSprint

Maybe you are just out of memory.

What's your pagefile set to?

pagefile? whats the and how do i check it?

[73GMCSprint]

The pagefile is basically hard drive space set aside as reserve in case you need more RAM than you physically have.

edit: wait...you're running Vista. Somehow I misread that the first time through. I can't tell you how to check it off the top of my head.

But one other thing to try that I can think of... Are you running the game as an Administrator? Sometimes not running as one can cause Vista to do stupid things. If not, and you don't know how, right click the shortcut to the game and you'll have an option to run as an Administrator.

However, some games (I don't know if FEAR is one of them) use a launcher to run the actual game. If that's the case, you'll have to navigate to the actual game .exe and then run it directly as an Administrator.

I'm not sure what else to try, except maybe testing your RAM and making sure all of it is working. Maybe someone else will have some more ideas.

[Sevs753]

Originally Posted by 73GMCSprint

The pagefile is basically hard drive space set aside as reserve in case you need more RAM than you physically have.

To check it go right-click My Computer and go to Properties. Go to the Advanced tab, then under Performance click the Settings button. Then click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory it will tell you the "Total paging file size for all drives." That's how big your pagefile is.

um, im on vista so i dont know how to get to the pagefile. do you think installing xp would fix the problem?

edit: i found it. it said 2346MB is my paging file. should i be higher? i still have over 100GB left on my hard drive

[Clegko]

Originally Posted by Sevs753

um, im on vista so i dont know how to get to the pagefile. do you think installing xp would fix the problem?

edit: i found it. it said 2346MB is my paging file. should i be higher? i still have over 100GB left on my hard drive

Your pagefile should always be the amount of ram you have, plus another half. In your case, 3GB of pagefile.

[Sevs753]

Originally Posted by Clegko

Your pagefile should always be the amount of ram you have, plus another half. In your case, 3GB of pagefile.

would it matter if i shoved it up to say, 10,000MB ( i really dont have much other than a few games on my desktop. i mainly use my laptop for everything)

on a side note, ill try upping the pagefile after i finish watching this TV show (i have a TV tuner card so i dont have to have a big SD TV in my room)

EDIT: i tried upping the pagefile to 3072MB. exact problem still exists..

im going to try the level select code and advance farther in the game and see if its a common problem. otherwise ill just reformat to XP and try from there

EDIT 2: appaerntly fear doesnt have a lvl select code. just one that advances you to the next level. and the next level is the problem one i'm having. so no luck for me. ill just go to xp now.

thanks for the help though. to both of you

[Sevs753]

Just a quick update. Reformatted and installed Windows XP instead of Vista. games loads new level fine. i can even play the game on higher settings with no drop in performance.

Mods: could you close this?

[73GMCSprint]

Glad that worked for you. Sometimes Windows just borks itself and there's not much else you can do.