First of all, just started Half-Life 2 last night and wow i'm loving it. I really felt like I was in a city from Airstrip 1 in the first bit, after being pushed away then zapped by the guard I pestered on the train platform, then talking to all the 'Proles' in the station I made sure I kept my distance from the guards and did what they told me (well almost, I did throw an old doll at one a bit later, and then started throwing stuff out of the 1st floor windows when I got upstairs). The only thing I don't get (though maybe it will become clear later) is how the inhabitants from Xen became integrated into society.

I have a question about game performance though. My laptop is certainly not meant for gaming (no dedicated graphics card) and as such I do recieve the occasional frame rate problem when things get busy in Half-Life 2, and sometimes bits of sound will get choppy or cut off, for example someone's sentence will start a second late so I miss part of the first word. Most of the time though (at least so far, i've just got on the airboat/fanboat) it has been running well with models and textures on high settings. This was not true however of Half-Life, despite it being 6 years older, and 10 years older than my laptop.

I played through Half-Life with similar issues to the above, but wheras in HL2 they have only occurred 2-3 times so far in about 3 hours, there was quite a lot of the sound issue, and more frame rate strangling, especially in areas where multiple "special effects" were taking place like electricity sparks, flames and pools of liquid (though calling them special effects is quite an overstatement nowadays) In fact in 3 or 4 areas the frame rate dropped to make it almost unplayable (at a guess maybe 5 or 6 per second) and wouldn't be back to normal until I had exited the area or killed off the enemies.

Can anyone explain why my machine has more issues with a game 10 years older that doesn't look much better than Goldeneye N64, than a game only 4 years older that technically surpasses most of the 6th gen games I have seen playing?

Something else I noticed was when I first launched Half-Life 2 is it questioned me about an unrecognised graphics driver, which I had forgotten about but it also did that when I first installed Portal (which I had to run on low settings but otherwise didn't have many performance issues). It didn't ask me that for the 3 Half-Life games though.

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After I finished Half-Life I went on to play Opposing Force and Blue Shift, in which the issues were even worse (I understand they were not developed by Valve, but looking so identical I assume they used the same engine) I actually can't complete Opposing Force because it always crashes in the middle of the fight against what I assume is the final boss (huge beetle thing that comes out of a purple portal)

Have you tried running Half-Life 1 compatibility mode for Windows 98?

Are you running it through Steam?

What is your integrated graphics chipset?

You may need to download AMD or Nvidia's legacy drivers

How much RAM? CPU name & clockspeed?

Are you running anything in the background? Better performance will be had if you close out any anti-virus scanners, browsers, and so forth (but you probably knew that already)

IIRC the Vortigaunts were slaves to the Nihilanth which is why they are friendly now. (Just to fill you in a on that part, dunno about your performances sorry).

Is that a specific mode in Half-Life or do you mean the Windows 7 compatibility feature (actually I think the latter might just be about Windows XP)

Yes through Steam

Err hang on: Mobile Intel 4 series express chipset

Maybe, but i'm not that bothered now i've finished them (see below)

4GB and it's a Celeron dual core T300: 1.8GHz

And yes I usually close everything down (except anti-virus). I did also turn off my wireless connection and anti-virus etc when I had problems with Opposing Force but it didn't seem to change much.

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Sorry I didn't provide more system info in the OP, but I wasn't really looking for a solution as such, I know my system isn't built for games and whatever I do I am not going to get great performance (Half-Life 2 crashed on me once last night though it is still running well otherwise) I was just curious as to why a newer game would run better than the old game. Talking about legacy drivers I am guessing that's the reason, the old games are not able to use the more modern graphics accellerator drivers I have, which will have been why it didn't pop up with a message about them being unrecognised when I launched them unlike with HL2 and the newer games.

EDIT: Just tried launching Half-Life: Source, and it asks about sending info on my graphics chipset like HL2 does, so my bet is it will run much better (and I should have playedthat instead of trying the original version first, but at the time I didn't know it was the same game, I thought it was extra content like Blue Shift/Opposing Force)

Was that explained in Half-Life somewhere? If so I don't remember it.

Your specs are more than enough, even with the integrated chipsets.

Right clicking on the exe file or at least the shortcut on your desktop and going to properties then check run in compatibility mode for Win98. Should solve your problems.

When I did that (there wasn't an option for Win98 alone, but Win98/Me is presumably the same thing) it doesn't allow me to launch directly from the .exe file... and if I launch by clicking play from Steam it works but doesn't seem to be improved, and in fact whenever I die it crashes and I have to exit.

It lets me launch from the .exe if I choose WinXP (SP3) instead of 98, but still seems to run the same and also crashes when I die.

The same thing happens with Opposing Force, and probably Blue Shift though I haven't tested that one.

Try going through the Steam directory.

C: > Program Files (x86) > Steam > steamapps > "username" > then half-life

or

C: > Program Files (x86) > Steam > steamapps > common

That's what I did do (I don't put shortcuts on my desktop) but changing to Win98 it wouldn't let me launch it by double clicking the .exe... so I tried launching from the Steam client and that worked, but in-game performance was the same as usual, plus the added problem of crashing whenever I die (presumably it doesn't like reloading from the last save point)

If you can't think of anything else off-hand then no-worries. I'm not really bothered if I don't fix the problem as I believe (though haven't tried it yet) Half-Life: Source will work fine if i want to play Half-Life again, and the problems with Blue Shift were tolerable if I wanted to play that again too, so all I am missing is the final battle of Opposing Force.

There is also Black Mesa...coming out...someday.