BF2 not running with new system?

Oddly, every other games kicks butt except BF2...she just won't load???

When I click on it, it starts to load for about 10 secs and then nothing??
It doesn't even show up in the Task Mgr??

Anyone have the same problems...after their upgrade to a new vid card?

(new Nvidia 8800GT card from a ATI 850 XTPE)

Judge_Mental wrote:Oddly, every other games kicks butt except BF2...she just won't load???

When I click on it, it starts to load for about 10 secs and then nothing??
It doesn't even show up in the Task Mgr??

Anyone have the same problems...after their upgrade to a new vid card?

(new Nvidia 8800GT card from a ATI 850 XTPE)

Google Nvidia 8800GT & BF2 for a start.

Might also Google BF2 and whatever the name of your video driver is.

I assume that the ONLY change was your video card.

get rid of your bf2 cache folder... that is what cause that problem alot of times. I think it's in my documents. Also delete your "logo cache"

DocJon wrote:Google Nvidia 8800GT & BF2 for a start.

Might also Google BF2 and whatever the name of your video driver is.

I assume that the ONLY change was your video card.

Hehe...I wanted to bounce the question off you guys first before I RTFM on this one!
I know quite a few have upgraded to the 8800GT and might have seen the same issue.
No that was not the only upgrade, just the one that relates.

I'll try deleting the cache tonight and see if that works!

I don't think this related to the card... for all intents and purposes BF2 only knows the driver not the card, so assuming you had Nvidia before there should be little difference besides performance.

Actually I had an ATI card in there...
Deleted all the old drivers though.

I may have to delete and reinstall BF2 from scratch! 🙁

Bubba suggestion is solid. I didn't remember earlier, but when he suggested it, it made me recall other ppl's BF2 problems in the past. Deleting what's IN those folders (I think you should keep the actual folder, though) was a common fix. I bet that solves your issue.

I wonder if that's listed in the "BF2 problems" sticky thread.

No actually it'll be better, your drivers won't be looking for the old card and you will have the most up to date driver.

I've always heard XP didn't really remove the old drivers. That's why there was a utility to clean them up.

Any truth to that?

Atomm wrote:I've always heard XP didn't really remove the old drivers. That's why there was a utility to clean them up.

Any truth to that?

I'm pretty sure it keeps the actual files but just deletes the pointer to the driver in the OS that the hardware device would use.
Because if I reinstalled the ATI card, it would ask to install the driver and I could search windows and find it.

Nope, XP will retain the drivers in the registry. Used to be you could go in safe mode and see all the the drivers ever installed in the hardware wizard. At some point they removed that. Often times parts of the drivers stay in the regstry. After you remove the ATI go into your registry and do a search on "ATI" see how many entries there are... there will be a few. This is the precise reason reinstalling your OS is a good idea. Think of 5 or 10 entries for every piece of hardware or software you have installed and removed in that OS plus then the dozens-hundreds for each piece of software you run plus what MS adds to start... your registry becomes very bloated quickly.

Bubbaspanky wrote:Nope, XP will retain the drivers in the registry. Used to be you could go in safe mode and see all the the drivers ever installed in the hardware wizard. At some point they removed that. Often times parts of the drivers stay in the regstry. After you remove the ATI go into your registry and do a search on "ATI" see how many entries there are... there will be a few. This is the precise reason reinstalling your OS is a good idea. Think of 5 or 10 entries for every piece of hardware or software you have installed and removed in that OS plus then the dozens-hundreds for each piece of software you run plus what MS adds to start... your registry becomes very bloated quickly.

Which brings us back to the question I asked in the "My dead computer" thread: Anyone use a 3rd party uninstall utility? If it's not a bloated, obtrusive memory/cycle hog, I think I'd like to run one, since that's why I format/reinstall XP every year or so.

I haven't had much luck with those utilities that compress/clean the registry. Just don't trust 'em. I've tried 'em a few times instead of reinstalling, but quirky behavior afterwards always seemed to be the result. No tragedy though, since I tried them at the point where I was ready to reinstall anyway.

Teh only registry cleaner that I have seen worth it's salt was the one that MS made called regcleaner but they discontinued it. Still works great though. MS also made a "3rd party" failed installation remover that was great but the name escapes me.

As for 3rd party utilities, I avoid them so I have very few suggestions. I found that most of them save very little and are either memory hogs or pack your registry with crap. My machine runs rather barebones. I used to run alot of third party crap and eventually found that they either become bloaty, or unsupported or cease to work and thus they weren't worth my effort. I can do nearly everything I want either through the registry or through DOS, that also helps when I do repair work, I don't need many disks of utilities. I bring one copy of the Universal boot disk, one of Ubuntu, and a Win98 CD to all jobs.

Bubbaspanky wrote:Teh only registry cleaner that I have seen worth it's salt was the one that MS made called regcleaner but they discontinued it. Still works great though. MS also made a "3rd party" failed installation remover that was great but the name escapes me.

As for 3rd party utilities, I avoid them so I have very few suggestions. I found that most of them save very little and are either memory hogs or pack your registry with crap. My machine runs rather barebones. I used to run alot of third party crap and eventually found that they either become bloaty, or unsupported or cease to work and thus they weren't worth my effort. I can do nearly everything I want either through the registry or through DOS, that also helps when I do repair work, I don't need many disks of utilities. I bring one copy of the Universal boot disk, one of Ubuntu, and a Win98 CD to all jobs.

Oh well. New machine, thought I'd check again to see if there were any new options to keep it running smooth. You know, the time to think of that is BEFORE I start installing everything. Besides, again, I'm bored as hell not being able to make the usual internet rounds.

Hey Judge, post back when you try BF2, and we'll get back on-topic!

We used a program called Registry Crawler at work to rip out the new version of Symantec so we could roll back to the older version. It works really well.

In this case, you could search ATI, it would show you all the keys and you could select the keys you want to remove and it will do it all in one fell swoop. We used this on over 100 systems and it saved us a ton of time.

http://www.4dev.com/regc/

Doc, you really need to look into Microsofts Virtual Machine. I think you could benefit from being able to install on a machine inside your main OS. You could even save the base image, so it's always clean. I'm seriously considering doing this.

Also, if you make the image with Microsoft Virtual Machine, you can convert it to VMWare and use their tools instead. Maybe I'll write up something about this.....

Bubbaspanky wrote:Nope, XP will retain the drivers in the registry. Used to be you could go in safe mode and see all the the drivers ever installed in the hardware wizard. At some point they removed that. Often times parts of the drivers stay in the regstry. After you remove the ATI go into your registry and do a search on "ATI" see how many entries there are... there will be a few. This is the precise reason reinstalling your OS is a good idea. Think of 5 or 10 entries for every piece of hardware or software you have installed and removed in that OS plus then the dozens-hundreds for each piece of software you run plus what MS adds to start... your registry becomes very bloated quickly.

I'll work on BF2 tomorrow night...

I wanted to post back to say yes and no to Bubba. Yes there are pointers to files of uninstalled apps, etc that remain in the registry. You would think MS would just keep track of the mess and delete it all when it comes time...yeah right!
And no, the actual drivers that I uninstalled no longer are referenced by reg hive hkey_local_machine\... but are replaced by the current working set...in this case Nvidia.
All my other games run fine...btw...so I'm still leaning on BF2 cache files as the culprit.

Windows Install Clean Up is that MS program that'll kill any installed app regardless of how messed up it is. It uninstalled my Itunes in 5 secs after I tried for a year to find the right util that would clean it all off!!
CCleaner is as good as the old regcleaner!

And that's pretty much how I maintained XP for 7 years and counting and not have it become a bloated dog!!

Judge_Mental wrote:I'll work on BF2 tomorrow night...

I wanted to post back to say yes and no to Bubba. Yes there are pointers to files of uninstalled apps, etc that remain in the registry. You would think MS would just keep track of the mess and delete it all when it comes time...yeah right!
And no, the actual drivers that I uninstalled no longer are referenced by reg hive hkey_local_machine\... but are replaced by the current working set...in this case Nvidia.
All my other games run fine...btw...so I'm still leaning on BF2 cache files as the culprit.

Windows Install Clean Up is that MS program that'll kill any installed app regardless of how messed up it is. It uninstalled my Itunes in 5 secs after I tried for a year to find the right util that would clean it all off!!
CCleaner is as good as the old regcleaner!

And that's pretty much how I maintained XP for 7 years and counting and not have it become a bloated dog!!

I'm not familiar with Windows Install Clean Up. I'll have to keep that in mind.

I've used Ccleaner (or CrapCleaner), but generally avoid having it mess with the registry - just use it for cleaning crap. 🙂

Atomm wrote:We used a program called Registry Crawler at work to rip out the new version of Symantec so we could roll back to the older version. It works really well.

In this case, you could search ATI, it would show you all the keys and you could select the keys you want to remove and it will do it all in one fell swoop. We used this on over 100 systems and it saved us a ton of time.

http://www.4dev.com/regc/

Doc, you really need to look into Microsofts Virtual Machine. I think you could benefit from being able to install on a machine inside your main OS. You could even save the base image, so it's always clean. I'm seriously considering doing this.

Also, if you make the image with Microsoft Virtual Machine, you can convert it to VMWare and use their tools instead. Maybe I'll write up something about this.....

I'm not familiar with either. I used SandboxIE when running stuff I didn't trust, but I didn't find it terribly convinent to use. It would be cool if MVM is. I like the idea of saving images. I was doing that with Ghost manually.

there is an open source VM software called innotec virtualbox, it's great I run it for testing software, running software I refuse to install on my machine (hello itunes) and for having several operating systems installed at once so I can walk people through troubleshooting. Also fun for playing with viruses... if you know enough about what you are doing.

Bubbaspanky wrote:there is an open source VM software called innotec virtualbox, it's great I run it for testing software, running software I refuse to install on my machine (hello itunes) and for having several operating systems installed at once so I can walk people through troubleshooting. Also fun for playing with viruses... if you know enough about what you are doing.

I looked at VirtualBox. . .am I right in thinking it wants you to install another OS, and run that within your current OS? A "box" within a "box"? That's probably very secure, and has certain advantages I'm sure, but that's a bit more dedicated than I'm willing to get. Thanks for the idea though.

OTOH, SandboxIE looks to be getting better.
http://www.sandboxie.com/

No news must be good news.

DocJon wrote:No news must be good news.

Sorry, I haven't had a chance to work on it. 🙁
Just been busy with work, my 10 month old son and a major construction project in the backyard that leaves me with about a hour or so at night. So I'd rather watch TV and veg or play TF2 instead of deleting files and reinstalling games...but I will get to it soon! I'm dying to see what BF2 looks like on the 8800GT card!!