Game crashes in Create a Sim

[ssb]

I recently bought a new computer:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz
4Gb ram
ATI Radeon Sapphire 512MB HD 4870 PCI-Express2 VGA card
Running on Vista Home premium 64bit.

It plays all of my games fine even my older ones but it crashes after 1 minute in create a Sim. The game can also crash after playing for long periods of time.

I rang the company that sold me the computer and they said it was because I was running under Vista64 which has compatibility issues. I rang EA up and they said the same thing but on other forums plenty of people have said it runs fine on 64.

I've already tried patching the game and all the expantions, updating my graphics card drivers, running it XP mode, running in 98/Me (which erased all my save games) and re-installing. My friend suggested switching to Vista32 but I want to avoid that if possible as I'd have to reformat and even then I could still have the problem.

Would it make any difference if I installed Apartment Life? Is that likely to be any more compatable with 64? If not any other ideas?

Cheers!

[jolrei]

You may want to remove CC (especially clothing meshes) and test.  CAS will sometimes crash due to incompatible meshes/bad meshes.  An incompatible hack may also be the problem.  Once again, the best thing to do is remove your Downloads and test it.

If you suspect the problem lies with Vista, you could try upgrading to XP-64.  There are arrr versions available.

[ssb]

Sorry I meant to say I don't have any custom content so thats not the problem.

[Jelenedra]

Does bodyshop crash as well? You could have had a file corrupt during installation.

[Zazazu]

Nothing's jumping out at me. Make sure you have the latest graphics drivers by checking www.ati.com. My one crash annoyance was caused by a bad driver. It hit randomly, sometimes after 10 minutes of play and sometimes after an hour. Luckily, that was the first solution I tried and it worked.

[ssb]

Body shop works fine.

I just redownloaded the graphics card drivers because I didn't uninstall the previous ones first. I thought for a minute it had worked but its still crashing 

[ssb]

If it matters when I installed the new drivers and tried to play the lighting and shaddows where all messed up, the lights just had yellow blocks behind them and the shaddows were really over-emphasised. When I dragged smooth edges all the way to full that sorted it.

I've also tried running on all lowest settings.

[Jelenedra]

*Jelly politely points to the modify button.

Try not to double post.

Have you tried reinstallation? The lighting issue sounds like a driver problem to me. Is the game Coughing out error logs if you run boolprop?

[ssb]

I've already tried re-installing but I'll try again now that I've updated the drivers.

Also I know I've already asked but would installing AL help? Its the only exp I don't have  and I'm just wondering because its newer would it have any more of a chance of being compatable with 64?

[seelindarun]

I'd get back with the place that sold you the computer.  'Incompatibility with Vista64' could mean anything, and more likely means something more specific with respect to your hardware.  I know a little about computers, but nothing about Vista, and all my noobish attempts have been successful so far.

I don't think it could hurt to get AL at this point, but at least arr the thing to check it out.  Don't let EA squeeze more money out of you over their fuckups.