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My laptops specs are as follows.

- Amd Turion MK-36 2 GHZ CPU
- 1024 MB RAM
- Nvidia GoForce 6100 (64 MB dedicated, 287 MB shared).
- Windows Vista Home Premium.

I want to run Halo 1 without the choppy sounds and slow frame rate I am currently experiencing. I tried to disable shaders but the graphics became very corrupted with wireframes and meshes poking through. On my desktop Pentium 4 PC with mere 512 MB ram and an ancient radeon 9200 Halo runs very fast with shaders off and decently with shaders on. So I am curious if this is a vista thing. Is there a way to run the game smoothly on this laptop without installing XP ?

You've made the fatal mistake of playing Halo PC. The game was so poorly optimized it was a wonder they didn't have the HUD telling you to press the big blue X or "Black" half the damn time.

That being said, I'd try to hunt down some dedicated forums for this kind of thing. LIke the forums of the PC version's developer, Gearbox. See if maybe you can't dig something up there.

It's not a vista thing looking at your laptops hardware, which may infact perform worse than the average p4 desktop. Vista is just compounding the issue due to the limited RAM you have available.

Integrated graphics are generally NOT your friend when it comes to games, and probably the kiss of death when teamed up with Vista and a horribly programmed game like Halo.

It's the integrated graphics chip that's killing you. Without more ram to boost that you'll wind up getting slow framerates at higher resolutions.

If that same laptop were running XP, it would be a smoother, though still have issues. Vista eats up a fairly large hunk of resources by default. Add on a decent-at-best processor and shitty graphics card that will constantly be biting into your processor and you've got a machine that just isn't good for gaming.


The solution, as I see it, is to get a good gaming machine (be it laptop or desktop) if you want to play Halo on PC.

Joviwan wrote:You've made the fatal mistake of playing Halo PC. The game was so poorly optimized it was a wonder they didn't have the HUD telling you to press the big blue X or "Black" half the damn time.

I must say I quite enjoyed Halo PC. Especially the online multiplayer.

Stargate Nerd wrote:

Joviwan wrote:You've made the fatal mistake of playing Halo PC. The game was so poorly optimized it was a wonder they didn't have the HUD telling you to press the big blue X or "Black" half the damn time.

I must say I quite enjoyed Halo PC. Especially the online multiplayer.

Oh, i enjoyed it too: It's the only version of Halo 1 that I've played, and the LAN games were amazing, even if the online netcode was completely terrible in both it's iterations.

That doesn't change the fact that it ran like ass on the day's bleeding edge computers, though. It really was a terrible, terrible port.

I liked Halo PC too, but after a while it just stopped running... won't even install properly.