I have 2 recommendations, the first is the best recommendation as I got something similar before and that fixed it.
1st recommendation = Defragment the drive that you have steam installed. This sounds stupid but steam is very vulnerable to fragmentation. Light fragmentation = no problem. Medium fragmentation = games might crash or refuse to load. Heavy fragmentation = cannot even launch steam.
2nd recommendation is a last resort if you are willing to spend the cash and are unable to find other way to fix it.
The recommendation is to upgrade your RAM(increase capacity) if possible.
Note: that your graphic card has low graphic memory and that Windows 7 will share part of your RAM to increase graphic performance. From what I know, it will take up to 1/4 or 1/3 of your total RAM. That means you will only have about 3GB RAM left, add in the minimum requirement of 2GB RAM for Windows 7 Ultimate x64(64bit) and you are left with some 1GB extra RAM to work with.
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1 - I have sheduled defragmentation running every Monday, so it never goes above 0,02%.
2 - I am almost sure its not a hardware problem because I would have problems with other games too and I play even more demanding games than those 2. I just checked and my free RAM is at about 40% when launching HL:D.
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Do you use windows built in defragmentation or 3rd party program?
I take it that you have also tried updating graphic drivers?(Just trying to eliminate probable causes)
EDIT: I just saw your edit. Then it will most likely graphic driver as you said. What are the advantages of the new driver? From what I know, old cards shouldn't get optimised much other than to let the system recognise it.
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I use IOBit's Smart Defrag. The newer driver have many more options that let me play games at more than 15fps and PhysX control that fixes a Windows 7 problem where the video driver crash and makes screen black. There are even newer than the ones I use, but they give me BSOD.
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This is a very common problem with Source games. There are a lot of topics on the Steam forums with others having this same issue, including Mac and Linux users. It's been happening for almost a year now and has become worse for many since the Steampipe update. Another fun one is when the game crashes to desktop but you can still hear and talk to other players and they say that you are still moving/shooting even though you can't see it on your end. Good luck with solving your problem.
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Hello! Some time ago I've made a topic about a weird crash that I had in TF2 and after many people cursed my PC and said that my low end video card is the reason I decided to stop asking and quit TF2 after the years of playing it (on this same machine). 1-2 weeks ago I decided something new from my Library and decided to install HL: Deathmatch Source, but got "Platform Error: module failed to initialize". After googling it I found how to fix that (changing Steam language to English), but then get the same crash as I was getting in TF2 - "HL2.exe has stopped working". I have contacted Steam support but if they were helpful I wouldn't ask here. If you have ANY ideas what can be causing those 2 games to crash on my PC, then please share it.
PC Specs:
AMD AthlonX2 64 @2.00GHz;
nVidia GeForce 9400M (GF 9100MG+GF9300MGS) 256MB;
WDC WD32 00BEVT-22ZCT SCSI HDD 300GB;
4GB DDR2 RAM;
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
EDIT: This started happening after updating my video card drivers from version 280.26. I am almost sure that switching back to this drivers will fix the problem, but they have missing features that cause much bigger problems.
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