I recently received The Orange Box, and wish to play Half-Life 2.
I am running a Vista Home Premium x64 machine updated to SP1.

However, whenever I run Half-Life 2, either from within Steam or from a
shortcut, Half-Life 2 starts, adjusts the screen resolution, and freezes
on a black screen with a frozen Taskbar at the bottom of the screen.

I have added "-32bit" to the shortcut line and have set the program to
run in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode. This fix has made Portal run
fine, so I don't know why it won't work for Half-Life 2.

I have not yet attempted to run Episode 1, Episode 2, or Team Fortress
2, so I don't know if they work.


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Alex S
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Make sure that your display drivers are up to date.


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Crispy2007

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With Vista, and some older video drivers, running Half Life2 in a window
solves the problem. You may have to use task manager and or the esc key to
switch from a black screen to a usable one, in order to make an in program
setting to run in a window. Setting Half Life to an SVGA resolution
initially may make it easier to set in game options (Windowed) before you go
for the higher resolutions that make game play more interesting.

The problem is that HL2 won't respond to anything, but it isn't labeled
by Windows as "Not Responding". I can't access any settings to change
to windowed mode, and I don't know how to use Task Manager to change a
full-screen program to windowed. Task manager provides "Minimize" and
"Maximize", neither of which have any effect on HL2.

Portal, which I believe is the same "engine" as HL2, runs perfectly
fine as full-screen.


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Alex S
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