So I just purchased Fallout 3 on Steam. I installed it perfectly fine and I open the launcher and clicked play. I made it to the Main Menu and I started a new game. After watching the intro and making it to the birth scene and through the character creator, the game crashes just after the "One Year Later" message after you are carted away from your mother. It crashes here every time and I'm not sure how to fix. I've tried all the ways I've found on the forums concerning changing the compatibility to either "Vista" or "XP" and by downloading the .dll file and so on. It's not launching or starting the game that's the problem, I get into the game and it runs perfectly fine, it just keeps crashing after the "One Year Later" message after building my character. Could it just simply be a re install fix? Let me know if you can help me out.

We need to know your system specs. Please post a Dxdiag in spoiler tags on this thread following http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1122570-how-to-dxdiag/.

The machine is a laptop, correct? It probably has one of these dual-GPU configurations that lets the machine use an integrated Intel graphics chipset for most tasks, and the GTX 260M for games and other graphics intensive operations. The problem is that these very often don't work right and can't handle the transition between 2D and 3D, and the machine forces the game to use the Intel chipset, which is not designed for gaming at all.

You can try going into the Nvidia Control and forcing the machine to use the Nvidia graphics for Fallout 3. I believe this is done under the 3D Settings menu, though I'm not completely familiar with the procedure. You may have to set up a custom profile for Fallout 3 to get it working right.

You probably need to make some changes to your ini file to tell the game to only use 2 cores. It doesn't like more than that and you have 8 of them in that machine. There's a stickied thread at the top of this forum that will tell you how to do that.

Yes this is a laptop, and I'm not entirely sure which options to change, considering my options are already optimized for perfomrance, so I don't rightly know which settings are necessary for Fallout 3. I've never had to change these for a game before. I understand you don't know much about this, but I appreciate the help regardless.