I got a new HDD recently and had to reinstall windows and now tf2 is unplayable. Every 20-30 seconds it just freezes up with the audio repeating the last sound for about 10 seconds and then goes back to normal and the does it again.

I've tried new drivers for my motherboard, video card, sound, I put the sound and video quality down to low in tf2 and it still does it.

Anyone got any ideas what my cause this?

so, to clarify , have you reinstalled tf2 itself?

I used to have a similar problem. Happened every couple of hours .. ended up buying another PC as i couldn't narrow down the problem.

First of all, in Steam right-click TF2->Properties->Local Files and do "Verify integrity of game cache" to make sure the game isn't corrupt.

Do you run AVG? Wireless? What version of Windows (XP or Vista?)

Could also go into the properties of TF2 (from Steam) and do "Set Launch Options" and add:

-nosound -dxlevel 81

(don't forget to remove this later if it didn't fix anything)

last edited by parabol at 10:50:50 27/Apr/08

I'm running XP, avast is the only antivirus I'm using, I was running it before with no issues

I'm running the same copy of steam and it's apps I had before (I just copied the directory

I'll try the cache thing and the launch options and see how I go

is there any way to reinstall tf2 without having to download it all again?

I'm pretty sure qmass had this exact problem, he stopped playing TF2 for a few months because despite his uber system the FPS went absolutely rape.

He's playing now so I assumed he fixed it, maybe PM him.

Copy out all of the .gcf files from the steamapps folder (that's all of your games, they don't need to be installed), and then remove and reinstall Steam. I've usually been able to do what you said (just straight copying over the Steam directory), but if you're having problems, I'd try to install it properly.

Once it's reinstalled, put all of your gcf files back in, and start up Steam. As a further measure, I'm pretty sure you can right-click games in the games list and get Steam to defragment them. Give that a go, and if it's still f***ed, I've got no idea.

I recently got TF2 working in linux and had this problem initially, solved it by renicing hl2.exe. The equivalent in Windows would be to go into task manager and bump up the process priority.

I was still getting lockups after playing for a few hours last night though. This correlated with some graphics artefacts shortly afterwards so I'm guessing the video card couldn't take it any more. Or maybe it was just a Wine/nvidia thing (it seemed particularly annoyed with IM/gmail popups trying to draw over the top).

Also, you may want to look into using the -heapsize command line parameter in the launch options. Although it seems that its arguable whether it actually makes a difference or not.

Were you able to get TF2 in Linux to play with full DX9 graphics? Because every screenshot I've seen, it looks like it's running in DX8.

Not quite... I -think- I'm using a hybrid DX8/9 setup via some registry tweaks that allow some DX9 features in (certain shaders, etc.) But Ubercharge looks a little wierd, and HDR doesn't seem to be enabled (although apparently it's possible).

I'm using -dxlevel 81 since -dxlevel 90 doesn't quite work for me yet (but can be made to work with HDR off?). Oh well, it's good enough for now, the reduced graphics make it run super smooth and it saves me a reboot into Vista which was always a pain in the ass.