Crashes gta 4 pc, no idea what's wrong

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I just purchased gta 4 pc online from amazon ( they have a good deal on it if any body is looking ) and i downloaded it on my vista... my vista has only about 50- 80 gigs left, so just as i was expecting, the game ran slowly, even with low settings, so i decided to install xp on another hd and install gta 4 on there...

 

my system specs:

2 gigs dual channel ram

160 gb hd (ide )

fresh copy of windows xp ( with sp3 )

intel core 2 duo 2.33 ghz

nvidia geforce 8500 ( idk if it's gt or not )

and all the drivers i could find ( motherboard, graphics card... )

 

so every time i launch the game, i click the "start" option and the loading screen comes on, then it sais "starting new game" at the bottem and then "the brothers bellic" or whatever it sais. Then the screen is black, i hear the sound start with the girl whipping the guy, audio sounds fine, until you actually see something. when you actually see the woman hitting the guy, and then the man going to knock on the door to see what's going on, all of that is choppy. a second later, the audio cut's out and another second later, the game freezes. i have to ctrl alt tab out, and get out of the game by ending the process...

 

during all that, i tried a veriety of graphic settings in the game. the first time, the game picked mostly medium graphic settings, and the above happened, then i went for broke and turned everything down to low, and most of the number options down only to leave about 10 in each option ( viewing distance and such... ) and i got the exact same results, which i guess rules out my computer not being able to handle it.

 

notice that when i do start the game and get to the main screen with the "start" and "options" menu, the social club application sais i need to install flash player 9, AND I DID! i nstaslled flash player 9 like 10 times, and it is still tellling me i have to install it lol.

 

***Also, sometimes when the game gets choppy as described above, isntead of freezing or crashing, the game put's me in the world! it drops my near a boat near water, and i can roam around! there is no mission, no arrows, nothing on the map, just me in the world! so maybe it's just glitching?

 

im about to re-install it, hopefully this will solve it, but please provide any help possible, because if i don't get it working by tommorrow night, im going to box it and return it, even though i REALLY want to play it!!!

 

thanks in advance to anybody!

 

 

 

 

EDIT:

 

i just tried to run around the world just now in the game when it glitches me in to the world without a mission or anything. first off, i have no cell phone, i see him pulling out his hand like he has one, but there is non in his hand, and i don't get those options... and when i run around the wrold, all the textures are... bad. there not glitchy and random colors, they look blobish and morphed together, but the colors and general shapes seem to be right, they seem to lack detail... and there are no cars, or people...

Edited May 23, 2009 by [email protected]

[[email protected]]

..... bump.....

 

and also:

re-install made it worse... now it only get's to the loading screen where you see the different charecters with the greyscale city backround... it shows a few people with the music on, then the music cut's out and it seems to go on endlesly with the music not present, kind of like it's stuck in a loop... i'm going to try and re-install it one more time.

 

few other things that might help anybody who might know more then me:

in this install, my computer froze and i had to cut the power ( hold the button ) to reboot it, but once i tried to install it again, it seemed to have picked up where it left off... i also tried the repair wizard that comes with the game... didn't do anything...

 

Also, my computer is custom built... so i know there might be some component problems, which i get sometimes...

if all else fails, i might just install vista on my extra hd to see if a fresh copy of vista can help solve anything... even though vista is a huge ram and processor eater from what i heard, compared to xp...

[Physicalfire]

#1 - Have you got ALL Windows updates?

#2 - You graphics card is not TOP, perhaps this could be the problem.