Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Portal now run like old man with bad legs

doublehawk00

For some reason, from the moment Portal and HL2: Episode 2 start their title screens, the games stutter a few times every second, resulting in choppy image and sound. I have not altered the settings at which the games ran before this problem, and this problem does NOT extend to Team Fortress 2. I have already updated my video card drivers and tried to free up ram for the games. Neither has worked. The games are both practically unplayable now. Suggestions?

wabbiteh

Are you running vista? Also, check if your hard drive is thrashing. I seem to recall hearing (though don't have any personal experience with this, so take it with a grain of salt) that vista occasionally does some strange things with precaching that can cause problems similar to this.

Try running the game in a window, with task manager running to the side, see if anything is stealing processor time.

doublehawk00

I'm running XP. And I already ran checks with task manager, and anything that would have stolen time away from those games would have done it to TF2 as well.

tsmvengy

Here's one that solved it for me: what Antivirus program are you running?

doublehawk00

tsmvengy wrote: »

Here's one that solved it for me: what Antivirus program are you running?

Avira AntiVir, personal version.

tsmvengy

Well, that's a dud, the documented problem is with AVG. You might want to try reinstalling video/sound drivers...

Willeth

Is it possible that you have them installed twice? Steam doesn't like that.