Hello,
I decided to open a thread here, because I tried googling crash problems and always found very old threads and no good infos here, I read all sticked topics and found nothing, so now I try like this...

I play Fallout 3 from many years now, but with this new pc only from some months, always played very good, with some crash (pretty normal we're talking about Fallout 3 afterall) every 3 even 4 hours of non-stop gameplay. Then I had a little pause, played a mmorpg for some time, never installed any other software in the while, so basically my pc didn't change at all from when I stoped, if not for the very few XP updates..
Yesterday I resumed playing it and once I opened the game Windows Live forced me to update, so ok, I updated...
After that I loaded my last save and after like 5 minutes the game crashed in a very odd way, I was clicking in a terminal option to read and boom, I found myself back to desktop with some part of it obscured and missing icons... I reopened Fallout to retry and it crashed again right after the save was loaded and I clicked the left mouse button to shot a mutant... So I restarted my computer and reloaded the game again, and again after 10-15 minutes it crashed while I was clicking something, few time later I left it on pip-boy for some minutes to get a bath and when I came back I found an error about a memory that couldn't be read,written and an error of a windows program (errors are all on italian, so useless to post them....), I couldn't even screen them all because the till Fallout was opened I had "lack of ram", but I have 2gb ram ddr2 atm installed (gonna do a memory test anyway this evening)...
I continued playing that way for the whole evening, it crashed like 15 times in very few time intervals, very very annoying, today same situation aswell......
I got no idea what to do, I found nothing usefull as I said, and this is the 1st time that happens to me, since I was using it for weeks without any problem or almost and my pc didn't change at all...
I made virus check, defrag everything and my pc is in a good health...
My config (always been this from the beginning):

Windows XP professional 32bit
ATI HD Radeon 5670 512mb
Athlon 64 X2 6000+
HDD western digital caviar green 640 GB
2gb RAM DDR2 corsair

Temperatures after 2h of gameplay:
CPU - 27°c
Mainboard - 22°c
Core 0 - 25°c
Core 1 - 32°c
GPU - 28°c
HDD - 24°c

I hope you will be able to help me... Because this really destroys my mood to play, and I really wish to play it, I'm enjoying it and I wanna complete all the map and DLC....

EDIT: Right now crashed after 5 seconds of gameplay, I was loggin into Live............................................... Ok, now is really pissing me off.

I suggest installing more RAM. XPsp3 (you should have service pack 3) and FO3 both require 2GB of system memory. Get 4GB if you can, though I can't remember if XP limits users to 4GB or 6 or 2.

-.-

A 32 bit OS limits you to about 3.2GB of total RAM, (including GPU memory).

I made some monitor, the crash happened when the ram left was 330mb + 2,5gb of paging... So the cause it's not surely related to the ram...
I'll make more monitoring but this is inexplicable... I always had 2gb of ram and never had crash problems of this kind, NEVER, and, be serious, Just Cause 2 takes 3gb of ram + Win 7 1gb, Fallout 3 runs very fine with 400/600mb of ram + 1gb (XP + background softwares)......... It's an old game now....
Even wanting to dedicate it more ram, I used SmartClose and killed everything except for antivirus and some driver software and the crash occurred anyway and always after very few time.

So? This is all the people in bethesda forum can tell me?
I would like to solve!

Same problems. However ive never been able to play for more than 5 minutes in the waste lands, if im in a town where i have to go through doors i have about 90% chance it will crash when going through one. From day 1 its been like this for me. Gave up after a few days after release, but have since tried again to play but still the same thing.

Ive done all the following:

- Reinstall of Fallout 3 with no background apps running (including Anti Virus)
- Clean installs of all drivers (Graphics, Sound, Network adapter etc)
- Install the game on my backup hard drive
- Disabled Games for Windows
- Put all settings on Low
- Altered the .ini file to use only one core
- Tried the unofficial patch
- Disabled AGP Acceleration in DXDiag
- Updated .NET Framework
- Ran the game in Windowed mode

None of them worked. Dont think i will ever be able to play it properly.

My PC Specs incase your interested:

Windows XP SP3 - 32Bit
Q6600 Intel Core 2 @ 2.4Ghz
4GB RAM installed (only 3.2GB Read due to 32Bit OS)
2x 512MB Nvidia 8800GT in SLi
1TB HDD (2x500GB)
Realtek HD OnBoard Sound

You're a quad core....
My brother gets kinda the same problems with a triple....
Try out the fixes and the solutions related to the quad core incompatabilities of Fallout 3, your problem is "usual" for your configuration.... It's not for me tho.....

Tried the quadcore fixes (you change something in the .ini file) that didnt do anything.

This is bad, somebody should really take care of this once for all.. :s

I very much doubt there will ever be a fix. Im just going to stay clear of Bethesda games from now on, which is a shame i loved Oblivion and never had problems with it.

So my mate gave me his copy of Fallout New Vegas because he doesnt like it and cant return it. And ive been playing it for 2 hours on High settings and no crashes what so ever. Strange that the new fallout works but Fallout 3 crashes every 2 minutes.

Guess i'll just stick with New Vegas.

EDIT: Spoke to soon, NV the same as Fallout 3, i can get past the "Tutorial" area and to the next town but after the that the crashes start to happen. *sigh*

Old games get updates; updates typically ensue more system resources.

Check the official fallout3 game requirement listings:

http://fallout.gamesas.com/eng/games/f3-faq.html

How much "memory" a system should have really depends on the user.....but, as per game requirements (both minimum and recommended) a user needs 2GB [alone] for the game itself.

-.-

The funny thing is that I didn't update the game, just Live updated itself... (why so should a game start crashing if NO CHANGES on both game and system have occurred?!)
The last update I made for the game was many months ago and was working PERFECTLY with the SAME hardware config for many weeks till I decided to make a pause from the game.