Got an interesting one for you...

[Emrico1]

A friend of mine is keen to get into BF2 online but can only play single player. He has a pretty old PC that he installed a 256mb graphics card to. For some reason it runs (all be it with low settings) fine in Single player mode (800x600 res and most settings on medium with 100% view distance).
He gets a minute or two of playtime and then it freezes badly and can not be exited without a full reset.
I think his card is an ASUS A9550GE, he's running a gig of ram, 7200 rpm hard drive, but an old 1.8ghz p4 processor (I think).
It's patched, new video drivers, and for the minute or two that it does run, it's ok and not laggy... Any suggestions?

P.S. at one stage it ran for maybe 5 minutes and almost froze but came good a couple of times (about once a minute).

[imported_AdenFlorian]

r u saying it freezes up when he tries to play online?

[Emrico1]

Yeah, only when he is trying to play online...

[xXSniper1432Xx]

does it ever unfreeze?? becasue with only 1 gig of ram it takes a while for the map to come up, also freezing can also mean the card is dying,if he has AGP he could get a decent grapics card for like 120 that will play the game on all medium and at a higher res ;)

[imported_AdenFlorian]

Online Performance
Hardware
• Minimum system - Join servers that have up to 16 players
• Recommended systems - Join servers that have up to 32 players
• High end systems - Join servers that have up to 64 players (http://www.totalbf2.com/page.php?do=sysreq)

how big of servers are he playing on, thats all i could find, other than all the sys. req. are barely met.

[Emrico1]

Yeah I was surprised that he could play at all, with his setup.
A large map with 64 players might just be the answer to what is going on... Thanks, I'll pass that info on and get him to try a small map with only a few players :)

Thinking about it too, I doubt his power supply would be up to running that graphics card... Update time I think...

[ConscriptVirus]

yeah..the processor is too weak for 64 player servers..cuz in single player, ur playing with 16 ppl (includng urself)

[imported_AdenFlorian]

glad i was able to help(if it was what was wrong that is)

[Sandfrog]

Computer freezing up is your hardware stalling so bad it locks up the software as well, or else you would be getting either a blue screen or software error. So this usually means a piece of your hardware is bad, either by overheating or erroring out. Either way, no matter how taxing a program can be on your PC, it should never lock up like that. It should eventually work itself out, just do it much slower than normal because of the immense load on the system.

[imported_nismojspec]

UPGRADE!!! there is no way you can play with that. it will attempt to but it wont last long

[Emrico1]

Thanks heaps for the help.
He's now in the process of upgrading :)

[imported_nismojspec]

tell us what he is buying before he actually goes out an buys it without knowing if it will work or not :)