I decided to pick my game of NV back up again after a couple of months... and now the game crashes after at most a couple of minutes.

Nothing has changed on my pc (no new drivers or hardware) and other games run fine.


Anyway, I did the sensible thing and removed all mods, turned settings down to low and started a new game... and I get the exact same problem. I can get through doc mitchells house but the moment I go outside eventually the game will crash. The furthest I've got is to shooting practice with sunny smiles.

What happens is the game freezes. Then I get a black screen with a _ cursor in the top left. Then I'm back at desktop (unless my computer locks).

I honestly have no clue how to fix this. I have windows XP SP 3, no codecs or anything installed (as I said zero has changed on my pc since NV worked just fine two months ago).

I suspect Windows Updates in this. Do you have automatic updates authorized? If so, one of those has stepped on either the game itself or on the APIs needed from Dx9, so that you'll need to reinstall one or both. Unless you took control of the updates, and created a Restore Point before the last such controlled update was allowed to run.

If you say nothing has changed then check how much space you have free on your hdd. When my drives are low on free space the game starts crashing constantly. I'm not sure if it's my virtual memory drives that cause it or if it's the game's drive that causes it.

Last night I went from around 15-50GB free space on each drive to 2GB to 5GB free and the game started crashing after 5 mins play. This is the 2nd time I've had constant crashes in FO:NV due to low disk space.

I don't know why that causes it to crash but it does. My .ini has bUseHardDriveCache=0 so it's seemingly unrelated to that. It doesn't seem like a virtual mem prob because there are always a GB hdd space available on each of my swap file drives.

It's not HD space. I have 160gb free on the drive with my swap file and 90gb free on the other: and no weird settings for virtual mem (auto managed as per default).

And I just reinstalled NV, Direct X9 and my graphics driver... Same exact problem argh ><

Maybe NV has patched so that it doesn't like my graphics driver version anymore? That'd be a pity since it's the best one for winXP : I have a Nvidia 9800 GTX with 182.5 driver.

Try: steam => games => fallout new vegas => right click mouse=> properties=> local files=> check cash (don't remember on english callname)

Well I fixed it.Turned out not to be the graphics driver at all.

It seems that windows XP computers with 3GB flag are no longer compatible with new vegas. Weird as it worked fine two months ago. But that is definitely what was doing it.

- It can't be anything wrong with my memory as 1) it would have blue screened my pc 2) I use other high mem apps (hence why I set the flag).

Any thoughts on why it started crashing after working fine before? Did you add any mods that put more demand on memory like an HD texture mod? I had crashes due to mem on both FO3 and NV and had to use the Large Address Aware fix to fix them.

It still happened even after a fresh install and removing the 3GB flag fixed it.