Mass Effect Woes

[Mad Wizard]

So, I finally got Mass Effect for the PC with my shiny Best Buy gift card I received at Christmas. Unfortunately, it's been plagued with problems. The first time I ran it, I got a general protection fault and had to restart my computer. I tried again, and this time managed to do character creation before another general protection fault occurred. It keeps happening, although now it almost finishes the first cutscene before dying, and it's not general protection faults now, it's just BSoDs and freezing... sorry for ranting, but this is annoying me. In any case, has anyone else had these problems? Any solutions? I really do want to play this game...

On a semi-related note, EA customer support is terrible.

My system specs, if they're useful:
Windows XP SP3
Dual core Intel Pentium D processors (2.80 GHz)
2.5 GB RAM
Nvidia Geforce 8800 (512 MB)
I'm fairly certain that my drivers are updated. I've got DirectX 9.0c.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[SurlySeraph]

Have you tried turning the graphics and sound quality and such all the way down?

[Erloas]

If you are getting BSODs then it isn't the game's fault because those are hardware/driver related problems. Given sometimes they will happen with one game and not another, but that generally comes from the fact that not all games are going to be using the same parts of the drivers.

The BSOD gives the application/driver that caused it, so if you can get that name that can help find the problem the quickest. It may also show up in the Event Viewer in Windows.

Find the newest drivers for your sound card and your video card at the minimum. There is an option for sound acceleration that can be changed from none to maximum, try that at both extremes and see if it makes a difference. Check your video card drivers for some things being forced on, such as AA and AS, because some games don't like driver forced AA.
I know ATI/AMD has a Catalyst AI option in their drivers which is supposed to dynamically adjust some settings based on the game but it also happens to kill some other games, and I think Nvidia has a similiar option I just don't know what it is called, you should try disabling that.

I'm going to assume you've been playing quite a few fairly demanding games with the system without problems so we can mostly eliminate things like RAM faults or overheating.

[Mad Wizard]

Hmm. Turning the graphics all the way down got the game to run, at least. It seems to me it was having problems with the transition from the intro cutscene to the actual game graphics. I think turning off the film grain effect is what put it over the top, primarily. Unfortunately, I'm still having some problems. The game worked fine for a bit, but the game started freezing up again after about the third conversation in the game.

[Erloas]

One thing to try would be if you already have the newest drivers is to go back 3-4 months and download an older driver version and give that a try. Sometimes driver updates actually make things worse for some game, generally it is only with brand new games so I wouldn't expect that to be an issue with Mass Effect, but it might.
Sometimes there are just issues with driver updates not installing cleanly, you should run something like drivercleaner (I think is the name) to completely uninstall the old driver, reboot, then install the driver fresh.

I can't think of the site right now, but there is a site that will scan your drivers and tell you which ones are out of date, but not just the common sound card, and video card drivers, it also checks the ones no one really thinks about like SATA controllers, NIC adapters, USB controller, etc and while they usually don't make a difference in these sorts of problems every once in a while they do, so its worth a shot at looking into.

[Gralamin]

Just a question, but what do the BSoD say? Knowing what they say can give a good idea of what the problem is.
Also 2.5 GB of RAM? Thats rather odd. Usually you should try to have pairs of RAM to minimize problems with Dual-Channeling. (Unless you had an i7, in which case you'd want to do RAM in... Triads I guess? Due to the Triple Channeling, you'd want three sticks of RAM).