Vista - Half Life: GOTY Edition

I bought the Half Life: Game of the Year Edition off of Amazon a few days ago. I didn't go the Steam or Source route, because I need a game I can play via LAN and not have to be connnected to the internet. I'm not 100% on how either of those work, but after talking to a few guys, I decided to go with what I know.

So I got the game today, and installed it without issue. I was excited and went to open the game to give it a run through. Then... it happened. The first error said something to the affect "you only have -6242.00K of physical memory, Half Life requires 16MB to run." Now I have 4GB of RAM... and wasn't running anything else, so I didn't know what was going on. I looked around and found out that if you have over 2GB it rolls over or something. Solution? Either run it in XP Compatibility mode or shut off the DPE off for Half Life.

After trying both seperatley and even at the same time, nothing works. I don't get the error message any more, but the screen flashes like it's going to start running, then the screen goes black... and that's it. CTRL+ALT+DEL, hl.exe is "Not Responding". That's all that happens.

I've tried restarting the computer, I've tried uninstalling it, then putting the setup.exe in compatibility mode then running it (also stops responding) and nothing works. Can anyone offer up another course of action or help me out?

Thanks in advance.

Have you updated it?

have you disabled your pagefile?

I downloaded the 1.1.1.0 patch but can't recall right now if I installed it, or if it would let me or what.

???

ha ha ill assume not then , i thought your out of memory error could have been due to not having a pagefile , some games/applications wont run without one

By DPE do you mean DEP?

Right, the DEP.

made a mistake i see you dont want to run it via steam

For Vista 64, you'll want to get Half-Life: Source. The game's engine has been tweaked to work with 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows and has better graphics - Source (game engine) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Unfortunately the game can only be purchased through Steam (9.99), and is not offered in place of the standard versions of the game. Also, all you get is Half-Life, nothing else.

Why am I saying all of this...because I ran into the same problems with Half-Life: Adrenaline Pack, and wound up purchasing HL: Source and my problems went away.

However, since you have the GOTY edition, you could try what archie123 said and see if the steam version of that game runs any better.

"If" you do decide to buy, make sure you choose the "Source" version!!! I made the mistake of picking the non-source version and had a heck of a time convincing steam to let me re-download the correct version without paying for it (again).

Alright. Well, I'm thankful for the efforts to correct this problem, but I was looking for something that I wouldn't have to download or be connected to the internet for. The reason being is I (and several other gamers with me) aren't going to be able to be connected to the internet, thus we can't download things.

I was hoping that there would be a way that I could just alter some settings on the computer so that I could install it and run it independently. Thanks again... I guess I'll have to see if AvP2 works ;-)

Mate im sure there is a way to play over a lan with steam , i know steam has an offline mode and im sure ive seen posts regarding this here

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that way you can install the steam versin using your existing key (the on that came with your purchased game