I read I'm not the only person with issues with the loading times in this game. I'm liking it quite a lot at the moment and am amazed it was released in 2004 (I believe). However the frequent loading screens last from 10-45 seconds and really does ruin the gaming experience quite a bit.

I have Vista Ultimate with no background applications or programs running whilst playing and ATI Radeon X1550 graphics card plus 1GB ram and Intel Pentium D - 2.6GHz (x2). A friend of mine suggested running it in XP and mentioned a program that changes the visual settings of vista (such as transparency and preview of windows when hovering over them in the taskbar) for playing optimal gaming conditions but could not remember the name.

Does anyone know what this program or a similar one is called and whether it is free?

Or anything else that could be causing the ridiculous loading times and how to solve this problem?

Thanks in advance

they have released all the vista patches a while ago for vista but funny enough as it is most games do run better in xp lol. But vista dos run in direct x 10 so they have released halflife 2 without the glitches, just look online for the patches.

Ppl these days are soooooo spoiled and have no patience... those load times are completely normal and can only really be sped up with a faster hard drive or raid 0.

Half-Life 2 just always takes that time to load, I mean, even on my system boasting an AMD Opteron X2, 2GB of RAM, and a 9600GT, it still takes almost 20 seconds to load the level. That's just how long it takes.

If you would like to run half-life in XP compatibility mode then right click on the half-life 2 shorcut on your desktop/start menu and go to the compatibilty tab and look for a checkbox that says "Run this program in compatibility mode for..." and click the combo box and select WIndows XP (Service Pack 2). I doubt you'll see much of an increase though, in load times.

pcnthuziast, your right. People expect load times of .1 milliseconds, and when they don't get it, they go crying for help. X_D

To OP, it is perfectly normal, and in my opinion, it doesn't matter as it does NOT happen anywhere in the game that is a)in the middle of a firefight or b)force you to wait to find out a key thing, such as in the middle of someone telling you something you've been waiting for. While its loading, just get up and stretch, get something to drink, or just pry your hands off of the keyboard an mouse for exercise!

My sentiments exactly!

Well... in older games like Deus Ex and Half-life ( the original ) you get about .1 millisecond load times.

Wait a second...did you say you only have 1GB of RAM? And you're running Vista Ultimate? 1GB of RAM is not nearly enough for Vista Ultimate. Drop another GB in and see how it goes.

You must have been/are running them on a better machine than me then (thats pretty much a $300 machine now, actually cheaper...), because mine was still about 10 seconds on HL. BTW, thanks for reminding me, now that I remember how to change levels, I get to finally start back off and finish the original, I didn't wanna complete the first half of the game again, as its not that fun to me. In fact, its nothing compaired to HL2.

I agree i wouldn't run any form of vista on less than 2GB.