I've been prowling these forums for a day or so, and have compiled an excellent list of fixes for various issues plaguing my game (such as the no-speech/delayed effects sound issue being fixed by increasing the games priority to higher then normal, for example), but there is one game breaker that I've not been able to fix with the advice that I've found here so far.

Once outside the starting area of Goodspring I start experiencing pauses where the game simply stops and my PC becomes completely unresponsive for anything from 3 seconds to 30. This happens at intervals of 5 to 60 seconds, and only in areas outside the starting town. It does not seem to be related to the presence of NPCs or MOBs, use of VATS, etc. Once a pause ends the game runs as silkily as before, so it doesn't feel like stutter (too long and sporadic) or lag (too silky smooth outside the pauses).

The game is utilising about 50% of my CPU (manually capped at 2 cores), requires only 0.6gb of system RAM, and does not access the HDD during these pauses. The game runs smoothly (40+ FPS) on Ultra and High graphics settings, and will keep pausing even when set to Medium with low textures.

Game process is set to 'above normal' priority to fix the missing speech/delayed effects bug. Steam set to run in offline mode. Unnecessary system hogs like anti-virus disabled.

I'm running a quad core Athlon, ATI Radeon 4870 (1gb), and a lowly 2gb of DDR2 RAM on a WinXP SP3 machine, latest drivers, etc.

I'd greatly appreciate any advice on this.

I have this problem as well. It probably has to do with our ram. Not sure, but that is my inclination. Annoying, eh? Sometimes it gets bad. Computer comes completely unresponsive. I was in a voice chat with someone on steam and it even disconnects that when the hiccup occurs.

Guys, it may be related to your quad cores....

Go here and follow the suggestions (involves changing your fallout.ini file)...

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1123968-how-i-fixed-bad-performance-and-random-crashes/page__p__16524001__hl__quad%20core%20fix__fromsearch__1&#entry16524001

Thanks for the replies guys.

Hopefully it isn't the RAM, too damn painful jamming 4gb into a machine that won't see more then 3gb of it. But I've just placed an order for some, so we'll see.

I've already knocked the quad down to 2 cores active, but unfortunately it didn't help. I even dropped it to 1 core, just to see what would happen: the game ran just as well as before, but the pause problem persisted.