Hi all
I recently got Fallout 3 GOTY & Fallout New Vegas Ultimate Edition on Steam and I decided to give Fallout 3 a try.
Everything was fine in the first 2-3 hours and then I start experiencing multiple problems.
The game simply crashes out of the blue without any visible reason. I start looking for a way to fix this and I found the Windows 7 Quad Core fix but it didn't help out.
The interesting part is that if I am outside any city I can play for hours but when I get back to Megaton the game becomes nearly unplayable.
It crashes mostly when I enter a room and it starts autosaving. More than 40% of the crashes I experienced while in Megaton occurred when trying to enter/exit Moriarty's & the water treatment facility.
I also got 2 BSODs when I tried to enter the water treatment plant.
At first I thought the BSODs have something to do with overheating since this problem appears to be caused by the video driver that crashes in kernel mode every time. But after I got a BSOD right after entering the game after I turned on the PC I start thinking it might be something else. Not to mention that I managed to play 20 hours without a single BSOD and then, in 5 hours (but not in the same gaming sesion or even day), I got about 7 BSODs.
I tried playing in short sessions, like 1-2 hours to avoind any possible overheating but it didn't help.
Moreover, if the game starts crashing, If I don't restart the PC after 5-6 crashes, the video driver will fail and the game will start crashing every 5-10 minutes.
Also, the saves got corrupted after 1 BSOD and 1 crash but I managed to fix this thanks to autosave.fos.bak
The game also crashed when selecting certain dialogue options. Eventually I managed to select the desired dialogue option but only after 10 crashes or so. This happened when I tried to five scrap metal for free to the guy in the water treatment facility (but didn't experience any problem when I met the guy at Moriarty's), when I asked Moira about radiations and when I asked the little girl on the alien space ship to lead the way.
I tried reinstalling the video driver and I also tried a clean install without luck. I tried to run Fallout 3 in compatibility mode with Vista SP2 & XP SP3 again, without luck.
Any ideas?
I'm using Windows 7 Pro SP1 x64 on a Striker II Formula, GeForce 285GTX 1 GB DDR3 VRAM & 8 GB DDR2 800 Mhz system. All Windows updates are installed and every single driver is up to date.

If you havent tried looking at your event viewer , do that and look for any relevent errors,warnings. Post em back here if you want.

Also wondering what graphic settings your running and have you tried messing with them? Is VSync on? off?
Has stuttering been experienced before your crashes?

But with your mention of it happening during location changes and Auto saveing. It seems you might have a problem in the save path.
To fix possible corruption in your .ini files found with your saves. Just delete them (both Fallout.ini & FalloutPrefs.ini) and start the game up. They will be recreated.
On the multi core thread fix , it would seem since you played so long without it , it might not be an issue.
However I suppose, without it , might be leading to these problems you are experienceing , since you have more than 2 cores.
So go ahead and put the multi core fix back in the new"Fallout.ini" found with your save folder"
Also some report that they need to apply the same fix within the "Fallout_Default.ini" found inside the game folder(Fallout3.exe location)