Call of Duty 4 hangs on launch
Name: Albert E.
I purchased Call of Duty 4 off of Valve’s Steam program. The download went smoothly, with the game coming in overnight. The problem that I am having is that CoD4 isn’t opening. I double click the icon and it just says “Preparing to launch Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” and hangs there indefinitely. It doesn’t matter how long I leave it open, Call of Duty won’t load.
I haven’t had this issue with other games. I got Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal off of Steam and they work. What is the issue?
The issue is likely that some of the downloaded content is corrupted. The fix for this particular problem is remarkably easy, as the programmers at Valve have added an integrity checker into their Steam platform. (It’s like a fancy Checksum validation of old).
What you’re going to want to do is open up Steam and go to the My Games list. Right click Call of Duty 4 and then left click on Properties. Go to the Local Files tab and click on Verify integrity of game cache.
This will cause Steam to validate the source files that were downloaded for CoD4 and will repair or re-download anything that is corrupted. It takes a while, but much less time than it did to initially download the game. If all is going well, you’ll see a progress bar like the one below:
After the validation is complete try to run the game. It should work now.
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Thanks that really helped me out.
Thank you so much! I have a new Dell XPS Laptop and I thought it was broken. I can finally play Call of Duty 4 now!
I’m having a similar issue, I get past the launching call of duty 4 screen, get an hour glass for about 2 seconds and then nothing.. when I bring up taskmanager i can see my cpu being used by a program called iw3sp.exe wich I’ve determined is the main program for the game. It will continue to run out of site, windows does not show that i’m running call of duty 4 under the applications tab. Just have that stupid process that just eats up my cpu usage and nothing else. Any ideas?
First and foremost, shut down every non-essential program that you have running and try to play the game. It’s a long shot, but there’s always the possibility that something else you have running is trying to reserve the same hardware that the game needs to run.
I would also suggest trying to update your video card drivers. With any luck you have an ATi or nVidia graphics card which will make the driver update easy.
While also doubtful, your sound card driver may be to blame as well. A bad EAX profile could cause it to hang, so perhaps try to update your audio drivers as well.
Based on what you’re describing I’d bet on the video drivers the most, but it really could be any number of things.
Are other similar games working?
Thanks! CoD4 launches now! Having it stuck on the launch page was soooo annoying!
I Love That Game But I Dont Know What I Like Anymore
This didnt work for me, i dont know whats wrong with my game but its still stuck on the launch screen. it wont show the little dots moving there just still. i dont know whats happeneing and i would like some help. :) thank you.