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Hi there.
I had HL2 installed on my PC a while back and it was running. It was choppy and the graphics were terrible on my piece of junk but at least it ran. Due to a virus, I had to format my PC and now that i've reinstalled HL2 it doesn't work. Everything's fine as it opens. The Valve screen comes up and then it goes to the out of focus picture of City 17 where it says 'Loading...' at the bottom right. It lingers on this screen for a while then the whole game crashes without a message screen.
Any help would be very appreciated.
Thanks

Did you install the motherboard drivers? Also try uninstalling the video driver and then re-installing. What are your system specs?

Check if it works with launch option -dxlevel 81 or -dxlevel 70.

If it works with those, it could be that your graphics card's drivers aren't compatible enough with DirectX 9.0.

I'm not sure what you mean by enabling these options? How do I do that.
Also, when i had the game working a previous time I installed the video drivers and that made it crash with an error message that was something like "cannot read video settings, will now restore to default" and then it would crash again. This time i get no error message and I haven't installed those drivers. I'm afraid that if I do install those drivers again i'll just have that same problem.

I had the same problem with GeForce3 and 7x.xx drivers. It worked fine with 6x.xx.

About those parameters, if you're starting HL2 from Steam, there's "Launch options" for Half-Life 2. If you start it with hl2.exe, you could add them to shortcut target.