Portal 2 keeps freezing up, then quits on a new Windows 7.

#1 · July 30, 2014, 11:07 pm

I don't know what's going on, but a few days ago I got a new, bigger hard drive for my computer, so I installed Windows 7 and all the drivers on it. My games all seem to work just fine, yet Portal 2 does not.

After about 10 minutes or so it will start to randomly stutter, then freeze up on me and eventually close itself. I don't know why it's doing it, it never did anything like that before and I haven't changed any hardware, except for the hard drive and I don't think that would be the cause.

I also tried disabling my antivirus, running the game windowed, rebooting the computer, nothing worked. Maybe there was a buggy update to the game and that's causing the issue? I don't know if anyone else is having this problem.

I also checked to see if anything is overheating or overclocked, but no everything is at stock speed and temperatures seem normal.

I decided to run Portal 2 windowed and have some monitoring tools running so I could observe how hot things got while running the game, again it did the annoying thing where after a while it would stutter and freeze up, then exit itself, but the temperatures never got what I would call high.

My GPU got to about 56C
and none of my CPU cores got above 50C

However I did notice the stuttering starts when my GPU gets to around 53C, but surely that's too low for any problems to start, right? And I'm sure it got hotter than that when the game was working properly on my previous Windows 7 installation.

Here are my System Specs: (FYI I built the computer myself, so it's not a store-bought machine)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
CPU: Intel core i5 2500K at 3.3 Ghz
GPU: ASUS Radeon 6770
RAM: 8GB
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61-DS2
Hard Disk: 1TB Seagate

So any help would be appreciated, I'm tearing my hair out over what could be wrong.

#2 · July 31, 2014, 2:13 am

Hmmm... Here there are some shots:

- Remember to verify the Portal2 local files, I didn't read you already did it.

- It could potentially be your GPU failing based in what you described, or maybe its drivers. Make sure you've got the most recent drivers, and if that doesn't work, try a different GPU if you have the chance (or take it away if your mobo has integrated GPU compatible with P2's minimum graphics requirements).

- Try different advanced graphics settings in Portal2 if you can do it before it crashes. If you can play it at the lowest settings, that might be one good track.

- Check out if it's a problem with Win7 and the UAC write permissions, give portal2.exe full permissions for example. Do that also with your antivirus, add portal2.exe as a firewall exception.

- Try to save some money to buy a SSD to have the system, program files and games, and keep that 1TB HDD for storage purposes, you'll notice MUCH difference in processing speed I hope that you at least made several partitions to help your computer to not process the whole disk for whatever task :p

That is all I could think so far.... Good luck!