Help... Why Is My UCP Flashing? *FIXED*

[SimsDiva]

When I play the game, the UCP flashes... sometimes just a couple of times before stopping, other times it will go on for quite a while.  It hasn't caused a crash so far, or prevented me from playing, but I know it's something that shouldn't be happening.

A few (hopefully) relevant details:

Uni, NL, FFS, and GL are installed.

Patches for NL and FFS are installed.

All were installed fresh after doing a system recovery on my computer last week and I didn't actually play the game until today.  Ran it briefly the first time... saw the flashing UCP, and exited out to see if I could figure out the cause.  I ran HCDU, removed conflicting hack files, then started the game again, but it was still flashing so it didn't appear to help in regards to the problem.

The hacks I have installed are all either for NL+, or specifically for NL.  (Wondering if NL specific hacks are at least part of the problem.  Does having GL mean I should have chosen OFB specific hacks instead?  I ask because the config log in my Sims 2 folder says my game is "The Sims 2, EP 3".)

OS:  Windows Vista Home Premium (ugh!)
RAM:  1024
HD: 160 GB
Processor:  Intel Celeron 430
Graphics card:  ATI Radeon X1300
Antivirus program:  Avast, which is disabled during game play.

I wasn't sure if I needed to get an error log or not before posting about this, so I decided to wait and see if one was requested first.  So... any ideas on what could be causing this flashing thing to happen?   

[gynarchy]

OS:  Windows Vista Home Premium (ugh!)
RAM:  1024

I don't know if this is the source of your problem, but yikes! Ewe need moar RAMs. 1GB is not sufficient to run Vista.

[J. M. Pescado]

[Gwill]

1 GB and Vista?
You need more RAM and less Vista, before anyone can start looking at any other problems.

Jeez... One gig...  Welcome to 2001.

[Quinctia]

Also, from what you've said, it doesn't sound like you've run this install sans hacks.  Does it flash without hacks?

[SimsDiva]

Yes, I know I need more RAM.  I'm going to upgrade it as soon as I can.  I'd have done it already, but I couldn't do both a graphics card and RAM at the same time, and the GC was needed to properly run S2 and other games, so it won out.

As for Vista... with all the hell I've gone through with it, it looks to have a short life on this computer.  I don't give a damn if I did sign an agreement to keep it on the computer until I finished making payments.  It's a shitty OS.  XP is much, much better.

Quinctia: I have not played it sans hacks since the recovery... I copied my previous Downloads folder from the backup disk back into the new one after re-installing the game.  Made sure I had all the updated versions of Maty hacks and ran the game.  But, before I did the recovery, and before I had FFS installed, the game ran perfectly.  No flashing UCP, no crashes, nothing... I would play for hours with no problems at all... even with just one gig of RAM. 

I bought a the Celebrations stuff pack today, and installed it.  Before I try to play, I'm going to go through my downloads folder again, remove all the hacks and see what happens.  I think I left the StuffIt pack stuff in there that I'd downloaded before I had FFS and GL and (now) Celebrations installed, so I need to get all of that out of there, too.  Probably isn't the source of this problem, but it doesn't need to be in there, either.

Will post again after I've got all that done, and let you all know what happened.

[Quinctia]

I'd pull your downloads folder and boot up the game, just to make sure.  Your system restore could have reset some of your settings that change the way the game itself is functioning.  It's a good practice to make sure something works before you try to alter it, anyway.

When I transferred computers, after I installed Sims 2 on the new one, I booted it up and made sure it ran before I transferred my crap over--even though I wasn't going to change my EP configuration.  I've moved entire Windows installs across harddrives before--but I made sure as hell the new harddrive was properly formatted and was able to install and boot Windows before I did that.  (Would be silly to go through a bunch of troubleshooting to find out the new harddrive had something wrong with it, right?)

It's just a good way to do things, not because it's excessively likely to screw things up (restoring than reinstalling), but because when you have a problem like yours, then you know for sure it's what you added.  If there's problems with a vanilla game, it might be graphics settings (if I don't run my game with at least a little bit of smoothing, my swimming pools cut through everything else on the screen), the drivers for your video card, the install itself.  If there's not a problem, you've cut out those possibilities by booting up the game once.

[SimsDiva]

Problem solved.  I got to thinking about it, and realized I'd never re-installed the drivers for the graphics card after I did the system recovery.  *duh*  It got lost in the shuffle of everything else that had to be re-installed.  So I re-installed the drivers, and voila... no more flashing.  Geez.  If I ever do a recovery again, or when I decide to get rid of Vista and install XP, I'm going to make up a list of things that have to be re-installed afterwards before I do anything else.  I don't want to make the same stupid mistake again.

Oh well.  At least my d/l folder doesn't have a bunch of useless crap in it anymore, and I took the opportunity to better organize things in there... so something good came out of it, at least.

Sorry to have wasted everyone's time.

[Gwill]

Nao go buy more rams.

[SimsDiva]

Yep... going to as soon as I can.