Half Life 2 mod problems

Klorgnum

I recently bought Half Life 2. Whenever I run a mod (doesn't matter which one), it takes nearly five minutes to get from the My Games list in Steam to the main menu (the game runs fine and loading times are normal). In addition, it takes some time any mods or the proper game to 'clean up' after I close them. That is, the hard drive is thrashing for several minutes once I've stopped playing, and it really slows things down. I've tried looking in the Steam knowledge base, but haven't found anything.
I have 1 GB of ram and a 1.7 GHz Intel Duo processor, and I'm running XP.

TychoCelchuuu

Do you have a bunch of other crap running on your computer? Is your hard drive defragged? Sounds a lot like typical slowness, really. How fast is your HD?

Ruckus

There's an option to defragment the game files in Steam as well, under the Properties of each game.

Klorgnum

Ruckus wrote: »

There's an option to defragment the game files in Steam as well, under the Properties of each game.

Forgot to mention I've done this.

I don't have any background programs running, apart from Antivir, and occasionally Firefox. It's been a couple months since I've defragged my computer, so I'll give that a try. It's one of those things that always manages to slip my mind.

I'm not sure how fast the hard drive is, but it's in a mid-range laptop, so it's probably not that fast.

TychoCelchuuu

Does HL2 itself run fine? What about other Source engine games like TF2 or CS:S?

SoaL

Have you started up HL2 on its own before?

It might be the mod is extracting the HL2 install from the .gcf every time it starts up because it hasn't done that on its own before. Just a guess though.

Casual

What HL2 mods are there? Any good ones?

Klorgnum

HL2 runs just fine and I've already played through it, though TF2 and L4D are fairly slow. I've only played them on their free weekends though, so I can't remember too much about their performance.