ligeti_and_sauce on 6/6/2006 at 14:33
I need to call upon the creativity and collective wisdom of the Thief community for technical help. Thief III loads correctly, but when I begin a new or saved game, it “hangs” immediately and repeatedly, making it unplayable. Sometimes it happens during Garrett’s monologue in which case about two seconds of his speech loops over and over for a while. Once I make it to game play, the same thing happens – I hear the background sound effects loop over and over while the game is frozen. If I’m patient, I can always press ESC in the split seconds between “freezes” and exit the game naturally, so it has not locked up completely. This same problem occurs, but with much less frequency, during Doom 3 and Thief 2 (it might happen every minute or so, but then I can play on) so I seem to be having some kind of global issue.
Before I list my specs, I should say that I have played and finished Thief III on this computer. The specs, though not spectacular, have proven adequate for all my gaming needs. This problem has arisen since buying a new hard drive and rebuilding (reloading everything) from scratch. The only significant differences I can figure are these:
Windows Service Pack 2 (I think I was only up to 1 before)
Norton Antivirus 2006
I have heard that Norton is bad for gaming, but I turned it off before installing the games and before trying to play them. More specifically, I turned off ‘Auto Protect’, ‘Internet Worm Protection’, and ‘Windows Automatic Updates’ as those are the only features I can find to shut down.
Here are my specs:
AMD Athlon™ XP 2400+
2.00 GHz, 512 MB of RAM
Windows XP, Service Pack 2
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Driver: 84.21 (also tried 77.77 and 56.72 with no luck)
SoundBlaster Live! [D400]
Driver: 5.12.3.296
(My DxDiag indicates that all devices are working correctly)
Lastly I should mention that I have patched the game, already looked at the FAQs, and have tried reinstalling the game several different times, all with the same sad result. Hopefully some of you smart people can offer some help - thanks so much.
Goldmoon Dawn on 6/6/2006 at 16:01
Make sure all your drivers are up to date including sound card, video card, and motherboard.
ligeti_and_sauce on 8/6/2006 at 13:29
Display driver - check
Motherboard driver - check (none seem to exist for Shuttle motherboard)
Sound card driver - unbelievable pain for the SB Live!
The driver doesn't recognize that my soundcard exists and apparently I am not the only one this happens to. The solutions that I read and understood did not work for me, and the others I read were way over my head (technically speaking). This should not be so hard...is this an old old sound card? Is it time to buy a new one?
I'm willing to do that, but I know there is no gaurantee that a new soundcard will fix my troubles. After all, I played and finished Thief III the first time on this card. I am still open to other suggestions.
New Horizon on 8/6/2006 at 15:28
Quote Posted by ligeti_and_sauce
Display driver - check
Motherboard driver - check (none seem to exist for Shuttle motherboard)
Sound card driver - unbelievable pain for the SB Live!
The driver doesn't recognize that my soundcard exists and apparently I am not the only one this happens to. The solutions that I read and understood did not work for me, and the others I read were way over my head (technically speaking). This should not be so hard...is this an
old old sound card? Is it time to buy a new one?
I'm willing to do that, but I know there is no gaurantee that a new soundcard will fix my troubles. After all, I played and finished Thief III the first time on
this card. I am still open to other suggestions.
If it worked before, then I think something is just borked up with the system. Have you reinstalled the card...uninstalling the drivers and then physically removing it from the slot and putting it in a different PCI slot? That worked for me once.
ligeti_and_sauce on 10/6/2006 at 18:55
What the f*^&!!!:ebil:
I unistalled the sound drivers, restarted, moved the soundcard to a different PCI slot, and reinstalled the drivers. No luck.
Then I tried unistalling the video drivers, restarted, installed the original driver, restarted, installed the most updated driver, restarted. Now, not only has the game problem not been fixed, but my computer cannot play any video files correctly! The screen crackles, then goes blank every second or so - it looks like the whole thing is going to crash...awful! (both Media Player and RealPlayer, but sound files work fine...)
This does not seem good. Of course, all my diagnostics indicate that everything is working fine. Most help threads remind you to make sure your drivers are up to date...yes, they're up to date. So is there a point when I should conclude that my video card is toast?
