I recently purchased fallout 3 on steam, and now i am having issues with gameplay freezes.

The game keeps freezing when I enter gameplay, about a minute after the actual gameplay starts. I have so far made it to the birthday section.

I love this game and am really hoping someone can help me with my problem.

Usually what happens is that i can no longer move the camera or my body, and everything in game freezes, but sometimes backround music still plays (i. e. the heart monitor in the birth scene)

Please help me. I would really love to be able to play this amazing game.

Sorry for the lack of info before.
I have windows 7 on a gateway DX483-01e,
I have a xfx Radeon HD 6750 video card,
520W psu,
intel core i3 processor.

If you have a console version, you need to be in the correct forum. This is the PC Tech Hardware forum, and you skipped over everything that makes a difference.

....What? I bought the game on steam. For the pc.... your the one that should read the whole thing.

Give us a dxdiag.

But im guessing you have windows 7 and you didnt install outside programfiles.

Plus you need to edit the ini for only 2 cores. Except Id be suprised you got it working at all without that.

Do you see our problem ... we have no clue where to even suggest help , because of your lack of information given to us.

oh wait ... here's the advice you were looking for.

Go buy the disk and install it on a machine with XP.

That will solve all your probs (damn near) guaranteed

I had a very similar problem when I 1st installed. I was having crash problems throughout the initial vault "growing up" and leaving the vault phase. The good news is once I got out of the vault I rarely had crash problems afterwards. Here some specific tips:

1) be sure you have rebooted your machine at least once after installation
2) make sure you have done the .ini file edits about enabling 2 cores (its stickied somewhere in here)
3) have F3 launcher and F3.exe set to run as adminitrator and compatibility mode set to vista (no service packs)
4) even after all this, you will probably have a hard time getting through the initial vault parts so here's what I did:

Birthday scene - after it loads and the overseers hands you your pipboy, immediately enter pipboy mode and wait 3 minutes or more. After that, exit pipboy and immediately run striaght ahead to get amata to talk to you. Immediately after dialogue ends, turn right and run all the way against the far wall to get away from NPCs for a moment. Now press 'esc' and save. Now go ahead and play normally... if you crash, reload your save and try again. If you crash again, reboot your computer, wait 5 mins for all the win 7 service pack junk to fully load, and try again.

Other vault scenes where a new cell loads - tap 'esc' repeatedly as the loading screen progresses. You only have about 1 second when the new cell loads. Immediately save the game. Now if you crash, reboot your machine and reload the save.

This is a big pain, but once again the good news is once you get out of the vault it will get much better - at least it did for me. Good luck.

EDIT: you may occasionally have crashes in the same exact spot out side the vault. In such cases you will have to leave the cell and return later (just fast travel away), then save, exit F3, reload and return to the area and it should be fine.