Fallout 3 crashes

[quaxo]

I bought Fallout 3 recently, but am a bit disappoint with it. Can't play for more than 20 minutes without the thing crashing. Usually happens when opening the Pipboy but sometimes completely at random. I've downloaded the patch and everything. Even tried the to reinstall and tried it on my laptop as well. Anyone else have a lot of issues with it?

[Kurtiskain]

I have experienced the same thing with both FO3 and ES4:Oblivion. (still do with the ES4)

Im assuming you are getting BSOD'd like I did...but FO3 did not seem to like my nVidia drivers at all. I would get nv4_disp.dll errors/BSODs when loading, especially when opening the PipBoy or going through a door, but it also happened when walking around in the middle of nowhere. I fixed this by downgrading my drivers a few steps. (from 190.something to 175.16) Of course this degraded performance a little, (by up to 10 or so FPS) but I could live with it as long as it didn't BSOD anymore

Oblivion does not like my creative sound blaster 5.1 card, either. It will randomly hand out BSODs from the P16X.dll creative driver, whether i am in 5.1 EAX surround or not.

So I would disable the automatic restart function of windows, (assuming XP here) Right click "my computer" and select properties, under the advanced tab select the third settings button and then untick the "automatically restart on system failure" box and try run it again.

[quaxo]

I was actually at work when I posted that. I'm back home now and was playing earlier and only then did I notice there is a BSOD. It's been popping so fast that I hadn't even noticed. I've turned off the auto-reboot. I'll play for a bit and see if I can't make it crash again.

[quaxo]

An hour and a half of playing and finally got it to crash.

Same as you, it was a nv4_disp.dll error. 0x0000007E.

I'll leave the driver alone for now since it's the only game I have a problem with.

[patio]

From MSDN:

A system thread generated an exception which the error handler did not catch. There are numerous individual causes for this problem, including hardware incompatibility, a faulty device driver or system service, or some software issues. Check Event Viewer (EventVwr.msc) for additional information.

[quaxo]

From MSDN:

A system thread generated an exception which the error handler did not catch. There are numerous individual causes for this problem, including hardware incompatibility, a faulty device driver or system service, or some software issues. Check Event Viewer (EventVwr.msc) for additional information.

Actually, now that I know what the error was exactly, I'm finding a ton of people that have (or had) this exact same issue. Seems the 190 and newer drivers are causing it. Kurtiskain is dead right. If I wanna play without crashing, I'll have to downgrade my drivers. Seems the 186 is the next one down that people are having the most luck with.