I've read many places that Half Life 2 isn't playable on the aspire one because of fps drops etc. Being familiar with the source engine, i decided to have a go at making it run, and the results are pretty good. Specs are Aspire One D250 with N270. 1gb ram with windows xp home sp3 and gma booster. I have put together a config which in conjunction with GMABooster(not sure if it makes much difference but it can't being doing bad eh?) will allow you to play the game as i am running it. Some figures: All Low, 640x480, fullscreen, untweaked ~12fps All Low, 640x480, fullscreen, tweaked ~23fps All low, 480x320, windowed, untweaked ~14fps All low, 480x320, windowed, tweaked ~26fps NOTE: 480x320 must be played windowed as it will default to 640x480 if set to fullscreen, but it is possible to maximize the window. As you can see, it gives a significant boost in fps, but this is outside in the open area. During indoor scenes, it can hit 40-50fps with multiple AI players interacting around you (tested in trainstation). To test the tweaks under light action, i used the rooftop scene in which large scenes are rendered, multiple AI players including a strider, 2 or 3 combine and pigeons which averaged at ~22-24fps. The fps does drop VERY significantly when volumetric lighting is in view. The fps dropped from ~27 to ~7. I'm looking for a way to disable this but it may prove a problem seeing as it is a brush effect (it's world geometry with a certain texture). Don't expect this to look nice. It looks more like a hybrid of Half Life 1 and 2 graphics-wise but all the logic of Half Life 2 is still there. [u][b]So, how can you do this?[/b][/u] First, open Steam, right click Half Life 2, click properties>Set Launch Options and write 1. "-dxlevel 70 -window -w 480 -h 320" without quotes if you want 480x320 windowed(can be maximized once level is loaded) 2. "-dxlevel 70 -w 640 -h 480" without quotes if you want 640x480 fullscreen Next, download "low.cfg" from [URL]http://www.sendspace.com/file/pn0txe[/URL] and put it in one of the following depending on which directory structure you have 1. "C:\Program Files\Steam\Steamapps\Half life 2\hl2\cfg" 2. "C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\Steamapps\Half life 2\hl2\cfg" Now, you can start the game. Once loaded, open the developer console with the ` key (left of the 1 key). If nothing happens, you need to enable it by going Options>Keyboard>Advanced>Enable Developer Console. Now, type "exec low" without quotes. Now you are in the tweaked mode and can load a game or whatever. It will reset when you close the game. [b]Auto-starting the game in tweaked mode[/b] Open config.cfg with notepad (found in the same directory you saved low.cfg into) and add "exec low.cfg" to the end of it, do not edit any of the other lines unless you know what you're doing! Now the game will start with the tweaked mode enabled. [b]Further FPS Boost[/b] Depending on how much you care about the looks of the game, you can increase the fps even more, up to 40%. In console, write "r_modellodscale 0.25" without quotes in console. You can change the value (0.25) to anything as low as 0.1(this looks very bad but fps is great). [b]Problems[/b] Occasionally the game will crash when it tries to load the next map. In this case, just restart the game and continue from the last autosave and it will work fine. Any problems, i can try to fix, next stop is tf2 (should run better due to lack of AI).
