Steam has betrayed me. Please help. PLEASE.
 

Alternate title: Fuck you Steam.


I only have one game on Steam. One. And that's Portal. Portal runs like crap because Steam says I need driver updates for my graphics card. But I've been okay with that.

But today I bought Team Fortress 2, thinking maybe this one time in my life I'd find a computer game that actually WORKS. So I decided to update my drivers first so the game might work. Steam has no idea where it can find a new driver, so I googled NVIDIA and found a free update on their website. I downloaded the damn thing, restarted my computer, logged onto Steam to test Portal.... And now Portal won't work. Every time I try to run the game, it gets past the VaLVE logo and then crashes-- Oh, but it doesn't just crash, oh no. That would be too easy. It gets caught in this weird loop where it flashes back and forth between my desktop (frozen, by the way) and a black screen with choppy segments of the opening music playing. It does so very rapidly, and will do nothing else. The only way to break this vicious cycle is for me to force restart the computer.

What's going wrong??? What can I do to fix this?? Am I doomed to never finish Portal/ Never play TF2/ Never have a PC game that actually WORKS?!?!?

Please help me before I kill my computer. And steam. And nvidia.

If you killed Steam I don't think anyone would be terribly upset.

But, more on topic, did you get the NVidia update from the site? Because that's important.

Start up Steam and right-click Portal and click "Properties", and check to see if it is set to "Automatically up-to-date". If it's not up to date on the game it might cause real problems.

Does TF2 work at all? Or does it do the same thing?

If it does the same thing I think it might be a video card problem, and that's a bit out of my area since I haven't had an NVidia card in a while and I'm not sure how the program works. If it doesn't, try right clicking Portal and "Delete local content" and then re-download it, see if that fixes anything.

Other than that, I think I'm out of my league here.

I got the update from NVIDIA's site, yes. And I haven't installed TF2 yet because I figured I'd do the updates first just in case the computer died.

EDIT: And yes, it does say "automatically update."

It might help out, can you give us your pc specs?
just in cas you dont which, the ones on Control Panel > System will do.

Just to make sure that the problem is between Nvidia/Steam/Portal.

However, im pretty sure the problem will end up on the Steam part.

Have you tried running the game in DirectX 8 mode?

EDIT: Also, its not Steam causing your issues. Once the game is launched, its all the game, not Steam. Although Source might have betrayed you...

I'm not sure what you need, but it's an HP, runs Vista, 32-bit operating system, has 2 gb RAM, 2.6GHz processor.... Anything else? (Why yes, I am completely computer illiterate).

Buh?


EDIT: Would it help to just uninstall the updates I downloaded, or would that kill the computer even more?

Right click the game, go to Properties, click Set Launch Options, and type in "-dxlevel 80" but without the quotes, of course. Try running the game then.

What does that do?

It will force the game to use DirectX 8, which has a slight impact on how good the graphics are. Thing is, on my old computer, it also solved a lot of crash issues I had. Other than that, its some sort of Source engine issue your having, because that initiates once you get to the menu.

Hmmmmm.... I dunno, that might work...

Any other ideas from you other far-more-computer-savvy-than-me people?

And is it possible/advisable for me to uninstall the updates I downloaded? I mean, it gives me the option in "Uninstall Program" in My Computer, but I dont' wanna try it if it'll screw up my computer even more...