Whenever I play L4D2, like usually 30 minutes into the game I get a Black Screen of Death and I have to hold the power button on my laptop to turn off and boot back up. System just becomes nonresponsive when I get black screen.

Anyone know of anything I could try and do to fix this?
I defragmented my system and installed latest drivers, still get the black screen lock up.

As a note: I play with the default graphic settings (I turn off AntiAlias though and play in Windowed mode). Windows 7 64 Bit.

I can play L4D1 just fine.

Thanks.

I constantly get looping Audio, and frozen video issues. I tried dropping all my settings to Med or low and other simple changes with little help but still Freezing randomly for good and requiring a hard boot.

Some People say that it's an issue that happens with certain dual core processors. Valve is aware of it and are working on a fix.

I checked some sites, maybe some of the fixes work for you. I'm sure you already looked around on the net for some info on this, but here is a link anyways.

Some Fixes

I hate unstable games like this. What a headache.

I guess I'm going to wait for an update patch, if not, what a waste of money! This system can handle any game that's out there, why should this one be any different? No idea.

Do either of you guys have Nvidia cards?

I do and I also get the small video freezing/lagging every 10 to 15 seconds, if I have all the settings turned up full. Nothing as severe as having to reboot though. If I hit "use recommended settings" it is fine. (Except that the game doesn't look as nice)

I had the same issue with left 4 dead 1 when a new Nvidia driver came out; it seemed to be happened in all my source games. Once Nvidia released the next version of the drivers it seemed to be fixed, or so I thought.

I wonder if it is to do with certain dual cored processors. What CPU's are you guys running?

Intel Centrino 2 dual core 2.8GHz.

I have Nvidia graphics card. 9600M GT.

Yeah, my game freezes before going to Black Screen. It's like audio loops for a few seconds then game freezes but before I can open up Task Manager to kill it my system locks up on a Black Screen.

Sounds like I need to wait for fix from Valve. :(

I have a 9800 video card in one machine and 8800 in another. I don't have these issues but I do occasionally see polygonal streaks across my screen. I think it happens when there are a lot of zombies on the screen and then the spitter spawns.

I agree that it sounds like a fix from Valve is needed. However, perhaps in your case see if you can turn off anti-aliasing. I've seen this cause havoc within other games.

I had that when i first got the game, so first thing i done was took the cover off my pc, cleaned up the cpu heatsink, replaced the thermal compound and also cleaned out the fan on the gpu, both run much cooler (wouldn't believe how much dust the gpu fan actually sucks up) Too keep thing running smooth i also slightly modified the side panel by cutting a 80mm square hole, then attaching a 100mm fan blowing in toward my cpu..

Anyway after all this cooling i have had no blue, black on any other color in the rainbow screen pop up yet. I'm sure it was caused by heat.. Maybe this isn't the case for you but worth a shot.

Also can you not alt tab, or open the task manager (ctrl - shift - esc) it may be your system is still running fine it just being covered up.

* ah just read first post and see you have a laptop, so this is obsolete now, oh well, i will leave it incase anyone else finds it useful.

Check your Directx Extensions setting, I'm not sure on the source engine directX usage especially in Left 4 Dead 2 but it could be the key.

Check out what I just found in the game, Try typing give rifle_sg552 into the console.

and these

sniper_scout
sniper_awp
smg_mp5

Apparently they were for the German version of the game only but if you type the console commands you can get at them in our versions.