radeon 9000 HUGE PROBLEM

[Tech^salvager]

I'm not going to try to get on the wrong side with anyone, but you may have a 250watt or 400watt PSU but that dosen't mean that its good. You need a good quality PSU in order to keep a system stably espically when OCing or\and running 3D games. Just because most pcs have AGP slots dosen't mean they will have a good PSU. Like my moms see has a 1year old computer running AMD athlon 2200xp+ 512MB of DDR SDRAM but the PSU is only rated to 230 watts well I tried my 5600xt in it. Now the computer kept restarting after a while it would happen sooner if I played 3D games. So I stick the card in my computer a 1GHz AMD athlon 512MB of SDR SDRAM. Runs fine + my PSU is a good quality 200watt.
*note my computer was bulit by me. My mom's is built by HP.

[Spartan Foods]

Ya I build my own computers... they turn out pretty good...

PSU might be your problem, but somehow many ppl have problems with the ATI 9000 range so it might just be a compatibily issue

[Tech^salvager]

heres some info I dug up that may help you
http://www.halomods.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=246

[wilso]

THAT'S WHAT I SAID! I just really hate it when I get ignored. When you play with the radeon 9000, it turns on specular by default. Even if you turn it off yourself, it still has some of the specular effects (some lens flares and textures that you don't normally see without it) so you have to either play in safemode or fixed function mode. and to get safemode you just put a shortcut to halo and in the target path put -safemode. But if you want better textures and particles you should use -useff. You can't turn on specular with safemode or ff but at least you can play it. It's better in SP2 because when it restarts it tells you that your video card crashed and that it couldn't draw all the stuff in whatever you were doing.