I installed Fallout3 on my PC the other day, and it played fine up until I got into the wasteland. After about five minutes of exploring the wasteland, it crashes to the dektop, and it only does it in the wasteland, not in the vault or megaton. I have made several attempts to fix it, but nothing works. I tried the many "fixes" that are available on the internet: disabling AGP acceleration in dxdiag reinstalling .net framework 3.0 adding fallout3.exe to the FFDShow exception list my specs are as follows: P4 3.06GHZ 1.5GB Ram Nvidia Geforce 8400GS 512MB it is running off my D drive (250GB Hitachi)
You probably don't have enough RAM. A bare minimum of 2GB of RAM is required to run most newish PC games on Windows 7 (regardless of compatibility mode). It gets to a certain point (AKA, the very large wasteland), and just bites the dust. Go here: http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/ This should tell you if your specs are up to par to play this game.
Fallout 3 would crash on my brothers computer. Mass Effect would occasionally crash on my computer if I played full screen. Playing windowed, it wouldn't crash. It really boils down to problems with the game itself. It seems a common issue with these PC versions. Which is disappointing. Either you play the console versions, and get affected by potentially game breaking glitches (curse you Oblivion!) or you play the PC version, where you can use the in game console to "cheat" past any glitches that occur, but you get the crashes In Oblivion for the 360 I could not finish the Thieves guild because a certain NPC near the end of the line of quests had been killed off by bandits while riding her horse. A common issue, and one that is easily fixed on the PC. But the 360, not so easy to fix. One of the downfalls with playing on a console, but at least you don't have to worry about the game crashing.
I'm running XP, so it wouldn't be a compatibility problem from windows 7 I meet the minimum requirements, the only thing that is at the bare minimum line is the Ram. I'll try it in windowed mode, and I just enabled hyper-threading, so I'll see if that improves performance any, since it did with games like h.a.w.x., and Street Fighter IV
i remember hearing that fallout 3 has troubles with more than 2 cores in that location, so if you have more than 2 CPU cores, change the affinity, then try...
I've got a pentium 4 with HT enabled, so it's not a dual core issue... I tried it in windowed mode and it did not crash, but the framerates went to crap
That got me wondering why all computers are different... so that means you can't play it on full speed?