Duck and Cover

So fallout 3 keeps crashing, for a lot of people it seems, and I was wondering if anybody else out there has an X-Fi card and are using Alchemy to get shitVista to play surround sound right.

I wasn't having any problems with my old sound card and speakers with regards to F3, but then my card fried, so I went and bought another one with some new surround speakers and used Alchemy to get the sound to work in F3 and now it crashes all the time.

I disabled alchemy and the game works fine, except I have no sound out of the center channel, which means no footsteps, gunshot sounds, menu sounds, or dialogue (which might be a blessing).

Anyway, just seeing if anybody has found a workaround, if not, it might be a good excuse to stop playing this game, but I was planning on holding out for any mods.

Does this happen?

Game freezes/locks up/crashes at totally random places and times, anything from main menu, loading a game, entering an area, getting shot/shooting an enemy, looking away from the screen for a second, to breathing.

Game sounds continue normally, like ambience or music.

You have to quit the game in task manager to get out.


In that case, here's the workaround:

alt-tab when you're in the main menu, enter your task manager and force the game to run on one core(in case you have a dual core computer, which so far everyone that I've seen with this problem has.)

Just unclick either core, and set the game priority to high.

The game might run choppy at some points, but it's absolutely playable. I have yet to crash at any point, but the game might hang when; quick-saving, using a computer, using pipboy or lockpicking.


I have an X-fi gameversion or whatever, it seems to run just fine on 5.1, but I'm using XP Pro, not Vista.

Playing on XBox and for me it freezes every couple hours.

It crashes randomly for me too, but it's apparently a random crash to desktop. Complete program shutdown. Bethesda just put out a patch, but it doesn't seem to address this issue.

Very very good game even with the problems though. Marvelous.

I had one corrupt game save that consistently crashed when I got to a specific point on the map. Going back to a previous save worked fine. I'd recommend saving often into new slots.

that happened to me frequently on previous games. I dont remember which ones. But i saved and the file was corrupt and couldnt load it, and that would mean starting a new game or loading wh... oh i remember it was fallout 2.. i would have to reload the save i had when i was back in the past.

I have tried the setting priority and limiting to one CPU. I have also turned off ALL effects, but the textures on low quality and run at 800x600 and I still lock up, but ONLY inside small spaces. When I go into a shack or house I lock up randomly and must reboot. It really sucks.