Game freezes randomly during VATS combat

[Kryogenic]

I just started a playthrough and it ran fine up until I took the first Wasteland Survival Guide mission to get food and meds. Now the game just freezes up and I can't even access Task Manager so I've been having to restart my PC.

I tired to .ini tweaks and that didn't fix anything.

I'm running Windows 8. Any help at all on this. The posted fixes didn't work.

[Traya Tyto]

http://fallout3.nexusmods.com/mods/13520/?
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-592568.html

[Vimpster]

I was experiencing this exact same thing, randomly freezing the game when I would atempt to use VATS, and requireing me to shut the game down. Interestingly I too first experienced it when I was on the guide mission for food and meds which was the first mission outside megaton that I atempted to do. How much of that is just coincedental though I'm not sure.

However I certainly seem to have fixed it. I only tried the .ini tweak from step 3 in the pinned guide and that solved it. I didn't even try the other steps. Are you sure you did it correctly? The line you are suppose to add after the first has to be in its own line, not immediatly after the first in the same line. Also you need to remember to save the file.

[Kryogenic]

I did the .ini tweak right but I found another guide on a tech site that said to alter the .ini in my documents. That seems to have worked. And screw that Kane guy that keeps directing people to that damn thread after everyone clearly states they tried the fixes there-in.

That guide says to alter the .ini in Steam and that doesn't work on Windows 8. You have to go to Documents/Games/Fallout 3 and alter that .ini.

So anyone else who tries the .ini tweak and it doesn't work, try altering the .ini in the Documents folder of the profile you are using on Windows.

[Vimpster]

Not sure where you were looking. The thread for the windows 7/8 fix at the top of this forum does say to go to documents/games/fallout3 in step 3, which is why I went there.

[BenWah]

I have to admit I still have a bit of vats lag even with all the fixes I use.

[Aether]

I see this issue is pretty old, I've got the same problem. exactly the same problem actually. Survival Guide, First mission, inside the mart freezing in vats combat. I had a few issues whn escaping the vault but overall those were minimal. I tried the .ini but to no avail. it really looked like it was working for a little while then it froze mid combat, right as i exited vats. I'm at my whits end.

Running windows 7, and fallout GOTY on steam.

[bagelhero]

From a post by ballisticfish on Tomshardware.com

Find the Fallout ini file

C:\Users\yourusername\Documents\My Games\Fallout3). Open it with a regular-old text editor.

Find this line: bUseThreadedAI=0
Change it to this line: bUseThreadedAI=1
Add this line directly after that line: iNumHWThreads=2

It supposedly limits the number of processor cores Fallout 3 is trying to use to 2