Help! Fallout 3 GOTY won't work on Windows 7!

So, during a long hiatus from the GWJ world, I took up Steam gaming and my library has ballooned from five titles (Half Life, Blue Shift Opposing Force, Team Fortress Classic and Plants Versus Zombies) to over 90 thanks to Steam Sales. So far, no issues until the Summer 2013 sale, where I made the mistake of risking $5 on Fallout 3, GOTY edition.

It doesn't flipping work. I've tried every fix on google, youtube, nexus forums, steam forums, whatever. The game will run fine for me for anywhere from 5 to ten minutes, then hard freeze requiring me to force a quit from task manager.

I'm pretty sure I'm dealing with a memory leak, but I don't know what to do about it.

Here's my specs:

Dell N5110
Intel Core i5 2450M CPU @ 2.5GHz
6GB RAM
Windows 7 64 bit
Graphics card is AMD Radeon 7450M or Intel HD card (it's switchable, and the Dell BIOS won't let me change that. The game runs at a healthy framerate on the Intel processor, but never cracks 20FPS using the AMD card.)

I've tried compatibility mode, playing with the number of threads the game uses for AI, installing a DLL that makes the game think I have NVIDIA graphics, moving the game from the Steamapps directory to somewhere else, and on and on and on.

Does anyone have any idea how to get Fallout 3 GOTY running on Windows 7, or should I just call that $5 a lesson learned about buying old games? (Even though Vampire, the Masquerade works like a dream on my system) Is there a mod that fixes it? An unofficial patch? Anything that I might not have already tried?

Fallout 3 GOTY works fine on my win 7 64 bit so i'm thinking that the issue is specific to your computer. I'll have a look when I get home. Mobile phone browsing with the aim of tech support isn't the easiest!

I'm not sure if it's specific to his computer, since there's a big notice on steam saying (for me at least) "Fallout 3 is not optimized for Windows 7". I was wanting to buy it myself but figured "not optimized" meant it wouldn't work.

There's a thread on the steam forum that recommends editing an .ini file.

Fair enough. Works fine for me though. :/

Maybe try that .ini fix, DT.

I already tried the ini fix. Still crashes.

Oh well. Chalk it up to learning never to buy another game that has this many known issues. I mistakenly believed that of all the threads out there detailing "fixes" that at least one of them would work.

Thanks for the help.

Have you tried either of these?
Windows 7 Crash Fix
Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch

This thread has some other suggestions to fix crashing (disable Live for Windows, disable all autosaving and use CASM instead).

It's this kind of thing that makes me cringe every release Bethesda does where they don't change/overhaul the guts of their engine.

I got it working in win 7 with the multicore ini fix, but it still crashes every so often. I know it's a classic and that I should play it but it is so annoying to have to play parts 3 times:/

dibs wrote:

I got it working in win 7 with the multicore ini fix, but it still crashes every so often. I know it's a classic and that I should play it but it is so annoying to have to play parts 3 times:/

Use CASM, it lets you set up a much better autosave system. I think the default is every 5 minutes and rotating through 20 saves, which means you'll never have to replay more than the last few minutes before the crash. It saves in the middle of combat too (though you can tell it not to), so you'll want to make sure you don't load a save from right before you died.

If you have multiple monitors, try unplugging them from the PC and just playing with the main monitor, that seemed to solve my issues.

nitefox wrote:

If you have multiple monitors, try unplugging them from the PC and just playing with the main monitor, that seemed to solve my issues.

*sigh* Bethesda... This is the kind of weird fix that gives PC gaming a bad name. Seriously, how many games come out that don't have issues with multimonitors (and multimonitor capability has been around for ages) that their game is doing some obscure ritual in your PC that such a thing upsets it.

Or it could be an MS security update that breaks things: like the mov halfscreen bug that was introduced through one... I uninstalled that particular update but it keeps automatically reinstalling...

Is that specific to games or just any video playback? I can't say I've noticed it .... yet.

Curse you internet!

Well, okay, it's my fault. When I edited the INI file, I edited the one in my Fallout 3 install directory, not the one in the My Games folder.

I made the multithread change to the my games folder INI file, and just had a solid half hour of wasteland wandering without a hitch.

Thanks to everyone who helped!

Incidentally, this will be my third/fourth time through the game (I'm playing two different characters at a time: one is a female heavy weapons expert with high repair skills that I'm playing with my wife, and the other is a female unarmed/explosives expert with high stealth skills that I'm playing alone. My first two games were with male characters (first was a stealthy small guns expert, the other was big on melee and heavy weapons but with low intelligence) so I figured I'd balance it out.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

Curse you internet!

Well, okay, it's my fault. When I edited the INI file, I edited the one in my Fallout 3 install directory, not the one in the My Games folder.

I made the multithread change to the my games folder INI file, and just had a solid half hour of wasteland wandering without a hitch.

Thanks to everyone who helped!

Nice! IIRC, when you make the threaded AI edit, it's recommended to edit both the My Games ini and the one in the Fallout 3 install folder, at least, that's what I've had to do with New Vegas.

Scratched wrote:

Is that specific to games or just any video playback? I can't say I've noticed it .... yet.

So far i know it affects games like age of empires and a 4x space game I'm currently blanking on at the moment. It's quite annoying but luckily it only affects the visual aspect on the screen and not the information aspect - otherwise I'd be annoyed!

[edit]

It's stardrive!

I had issues with FO3 and alt-tabbing back and forth to desktop. It would alt-tab to desktop, but not back to the game. I ended up using a "fake fullscreen" windowed mode and was in business. Also, I highly recommend the disable GFWL mod. That makes the game load much faster and gets you access to your saved games quickly.

Having some of the same issues. Fired this up today and game crashed twice before I left the Vault.

Don't think GFWL is the issue anymore. But I haven't tried any mods like CASM yet. Looks like you have to install some other mod manager to even use that?

Just wanted to finally clear this one off the pile, with the Fallout 4 talk increasing, seemed like time.

I guess I'll look at the ini tweaks above. But if anyone has any other ideas for Win7 x64, Intel CPU, Nvidia 750 TI, let me know.

Try this out

https://steamcommunity.com/app/22370...

It basically limits the game to only using 1 cpu core because apparently it has trouble with multiple cores.

Yep, that's the same ini fix posted above I think. I tried it, and made it out of the vault and into megaton, played for a bit without any crashes. Hopefully that's all it was.

There is a mod called a tale of two fallouts that lets you play FO3 in FONV engine. It basically turns FO3 into a a giant mod for FONV. FONV has it's problems but not as many as FO3 so you might one to give that try. You will need to have all DLC for both games or the game of the year editions of both games.