F1 2010 – How To Fix Save Issues, Fullscreen Display Problems, Crashes & More (PC)

Another high profile video game hits the PC and here comes our routine troubleshooting and help article for F1 2010. F1 2010 is the latest racing game from the veteran developer Codemasters and it was released to the public on the 22nd, in North American markets. As the title of the game suggests, it’s based on the 2010 season of the Formula One motor racing series. I have had the opportunity to play the game for quite some time and I found the experience to be enjoyable. I wouldn’t call it a hard core F1 simulation since there are a lot of arcade elements but it’s definitely a fun game to play. Either was this troubleshooting article should hopefully help you avert some of the most common issues with the game, namely display and save issues.

How do I save progress in F1 2010?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions in our troubleshooting articles. F1 2010 is a Games For Windows Live (GFWL) based title and you need access to a GFWL account in order to save game progress. But don’t worry,  in case you don’t have an online profile, you can still save the game using an offline account. Step by step instructions on how to do this is given below:

1. Launch the game. Open the Windows Live menu (or it will open automatically, prompting you to log in or create a new account).
2. If you are not logged into any GFWL profile continue to step 3. If you are already logged onto a profile (local or online), try launching the single player component and try to save progress. If saving and loading works fine, you obviously have no problem. If it does not work, you’ll need to sign out of the current profile before continuing to step 3 (Create profile button will only become visible when you aren’t logged in).
3. Click on ‘Create new profile’ button.
4. In the dialog box that pops up DO NOT hit continue. Hitting continue will take you to a registration page for an ONLINE profile – this is not the requirement.
5. Once in the ‘Create Gamer Profile’ window, scroll down so that you can see the bottom paragraph.
6. Look for the hyperlinked ‘created a local profile’ link in last paragraph. Clicking this will allow you to create a new offline profile.

Note that an offline GFWL account will not let you play online. But you should be able to play single player mode without any issues whatsoever.

F1 2010 does not run in full screen after ALT + TAB

This seems to be another common issue with F1 2010. If you for any reason ALT + TABBED out of the game (and many of us do this), you might find the game no longer starts in full screen mode – it will always run in a maximized windowed mode. Not only does this ruin the gameplay experience but it might even lead to crashes or black screens when trying to start a race.  The solution however is very simple. When this happens, all you have to do is to press ALT + ENTER to re enter full screen mode (this is a standard windows keyboard shortcut).

Avoid crash in race mode by forcing the game to run in DirectX 9 (UPDATED)

In certain computer hardware configurations (including on certain multi core processors), the game might crash when trying to start a race or during your first race. The crash may be due to a number of reasons but here are a few things that might help avert it

1. Install everything found in the ‘redist’ folder in the game’s installation DVD. These are support runtime components that are required for Formula One 2010 to run properly.

Force the game to run in DirectX 9 mode:

1. Navigate to the My Documents -> My Games -> Formula One –> Hardwaresettings folder.
2. Open the hardware_settings_config.xml file with a text editor.
3. Look for the string <directx forcedx9="false" /> inside the file. Change this line so that it reads <directx forcedx9="true" />
4. This will now force your game to run in DX9 mode.

As of right now I haven’t heard about any other showstopper bugs with F1 2010 apart from those mentioned above. I will update the post if new issues/fixes are discovered. Feel free to share your experiences in comments.

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