Extensive crash problem

[Qosmic]

Hello everybody! (in a Simpson mood...)

I've had crashing problems on and off for about a year, and I'm getting so sick of them. I don't know how many times I've uninstalled and reinstalled, emptied my downloads folder etc etc. For a while it seemed to be overheating of my graphics card, as it got better if I cleaned the fan and played the game with a "cold" computer (not having it turned on for hours before playing). I even bought a more powerful fan for it (the graphic card). I can deal with crashes now and then, but not when I can't even play 10 RL minutes without getting one. Especially since it doesn't matter if I currently have only the base game or any EPs installed, empty or full downloads folder, with ot without patches, am in build/buy/play mode or neighbourhood view, CAS or whatever. I cancelled my preorder of OFB a week ago, since I can't see any point wasting money on that when I can't play the game and EPs I already have. I have a fairly good computer with 1 GB of RAM, a 256 Radeon 9600, 200 GB storage, 3 GHz Pentium 4 CPU. And since nothing else is behaving strange except for sims, it shouldn't be my computer, I don't think. I know it's just a game, but it's my stress reliever, or at least it used to be, but now it's the main reson for causing stress instead. I'm really at the end of my rope here.  I've been looking for solutions for a year, but can't find anything that works for me (yes, I always search for answers before asking in a post ).

It'd be good karma to make any suggestions.

[ZephyrZodiac]

I had a similar problem when I first installed thesims2, and it turned out to be a combination of the Power Unit and the Motherboard.

[Bangelnuts]

Did you check the date that add/ remove programs has listed as last used date? I just went through the BFBVFS repeatedly in a weeks span and did the usual "remedies" and nothing worked!  So after talking with EA Tech support on the phone repeatedly we discovered that the dat of last use for Uni and NL was 3/30/2069 some 63 years in the future it turned out that a scratch was on Uni and NL disks and it damaged the date stamp on the disk so the computer couldnt read it . the game wouldnt play or load correctly without crashing just minutes into play because of the damage to the disc's.my daughter bought brand new copies of Uni and NL .I installed them and the game has been humming along ever since.you might want to clean the discs and check them for scratches.as certain files onthe disc are crucial to gameplay .

[nectere]

Do you have a firewall running when you try playing the game? An issue I have read about is the ~e5.0001 that cant write a temp file to disk because of a firewall running which results in the game crashing. The ~e5.0001 is a copy protection program used by several games. Just curious.

[Qosmic]

Nope, no firewall.

[Qosmic]

ZephyrZodiac, I must confess I don't really get what you mean. How did you solve it and how did you find out that was the reason for your problems?

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, my game doesn't crash even if the PC gets a bit hot, lags a bit and complains until I give it a rest, but no crashing.  

One thought occurs, how did you uninstall/reinstall?  did you do it from the disk, or did you just uninstall from the control Panel?  If you did that, and by some lucky chance were able to reinstall, the chances are you now have a double entry in your registry which could be the problem.

ZephyrZodiac, I must confess I don't really get what you mean. How did you solve it and how did you find out that was the reason for your problems?

Oh, I wasn't the brains who solved that one, it was the guy who built my PC!  And it had to be rebuilt with a new motherboard and new power unit etc.

[Qosmic]

Strange - I wrote a post in addition to what Bangelnuts said, but it's not showing... Anyway, my game dates are old, NL and uni dates to about 2 months ago (late December).

I actually don't remember how I uninstalled. But I've uninstalled and reinstalled many, many times due to TS2 crash problems. Is it in regedit I can see if I have double entries? I seem to have a EA GAMES folder and a Electronic Arts folder with the EA GAMES folder inside. Is that what you mean? If this is my problem, how do I solve it? Will another uninstallation via the CDs be enough?

Did your computer show any signs of the power/motherboard problem when not playing TS2?

[ZephyrZodiac]

Eventually I had problems loading windows at all, but it was spasmodic enough for me to be able to  get into the PC and back most stuff up.  Then, sometimes the game would load and run for a  while, sometimes it crashed immediately I tried to load it.  there was no real pattern.

Duplicate registry entries would be in regedit if you know where to look - I personally don't, but I did get a program called RegCleaner which finds these kind of files.  As far as I remember, I have only one entry for the base game, each EP and Homecrafter.  If you have any of them duplicated, it could cause crashing.

[Qosmic]

Thanks, I'm gonna try that program and see if it comes up with anything!

[ZephyrZodiac]

Well, it can't hurt as long as you're careful!

[Renatus]

Hm... have you done anything with your video card drivers? I notice you have an ATI card, and I know that for some people with ATI cards get crashes because the driver goes into an infinite loop. However, I can't say for any certainity if this might be your problem or not since you didn't say how it crashes. If the other suggestions don't help, could you please tell us what exactly happens when you experience a crash? The symptoms are important, because different symptoms often point to different problems.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Renatus, that definitely sounds like you're onto something!

[Qosmic]

I get an error message saying "bla bla will now terminate" or something like that, and when I click ok, TS2 shuts down and I'm on the desktop again. That can happen while in build/buy/play/CAS/neighbourhood/saving/loading etc. I'm not sure what you mean by done anything to my video card drivers. I updated them a long time ago, but I've been playing without any real problems since then. All DX diag tests work, if that's any help. Oh, and I didn't have any multiple register entries.

[ZephyrZodiac]

Did you update your drivers before or after you  installed the EPs?

[Qosmic]

I've uninstalled and reinstalled a number of times after updating the drivers, both the base game and the EPs, but I'm 99,99 % sure it isn't the drivers. Problems became worse too long after I did that.

[angelyne]

One thing you did not mention.... are you playing with the same neighbourhood in all of those scenarios you mentioned ?

If so you might try creating a new user on your computer ( I assume you have XP) and starting a game there.  See if the problem re-occurs.  If it doesn't reoccur then there is a problem with your game file.

If it does reoccur, then your program is either with your installation, (unlikely since you've reinstalled a gazillion time) or it's a PC/Driver issue. 

Also please check your Sim log files (\Documents and Settings\name\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Logs).  See if the AppErrors.log has anything that would shed some light on the situation.

Try me test.  It's important to determine if the problem is with your current neighbourhood or not

[ZephyrZodiac]

You say the problems became worse - does that mean that there were always problems of some sort?

[Renatus]

 I don't understand what you mean by saying that you haven't had any real problems since you updated your video drivers - you're still getting frequent crashes, correct? If it is the driver crashing it has absolutely nothing to do with game performance otherwise.

What I want to know is precisely what happens when you get a crash. It sounds like you get an error message - what is it, exactly? What also happens when the error message pops up - does the game lock up, does the music stop or keep going, does the game terminate and go back to the desktop but the computer is otherwise fine, or does it change your screen resolution? Also, it would be helpful to know at what point these crashes started happening to you - soon after you got the game or after playing it for days/weeks/months.

Try Angelyne's suggestion first, though. That's and easy one to do and easy to get out of the way if it turns out not to help.

[Lythdan]

Eurgh, sorry to barge in here, but what exactly causes a driver to go into a 'infinite loop'? Is this what may be causing my VPU recovers? And I've beem having problems taking photos for a while, it takes about 3 minutes each time because it kinda clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks...then eventually FLASH.

[cwykes]

I guess you've already thought of most of this and I admire the quality of the help you're getting.  I'm posting some simple stuff you've probably already thought of - mainly in sympathy. 

Sims2 doesn't like other programs running in the background and it likes to have plenty of disk space to save into as well.  I know people who have to close down their firewall as well as their virus checker msn and the kitchen sink to play.  Mine dumps me to desktop occasionally if I leave the viruschecker running.  Before I upgraded the PC it used to crash.  I also came across a couple of people who'd filled up the HD and were having problems.

I wouldn't bother setting up a new user account.  I tend to move the whole sims2 folder to desktop.  A whole new set of game files regenerates when you start the game. 

another stupid question - does it ever crash when you are doing something else?

[Renatus]

Eurgh, sorry to barge in here, but what exactly causes a driver to go into a 'infinite loop'? Is this what may be causing my VPU recovers? And I've beem having problems taking photos for a while, it takes about 3 minutes each time because it kinda clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks...then eventually FLASH.

I think it might be related to VPU recover, but when I had a crashing problem turning it off didn't do a thing - in either case I was getting a full system lockup or a crash to the desktop with an error message related to one of the drivers in the set and my resolution changed to 640x480. That's bad. I found out it was going into an infinite loop by looking in the system error logs, because the onscreen error message wasn't very verbose about it. VPU recover, when it works, prevents everything going tits up like that.

As for the direct cause of the infinite loops, I could only make wild guesses. It's something to do with how the game (and a few other newer games) communicates with the video drivers, as I have scads of other games that don't do this, but what it might be I have no idea.

[J. M. Pescado]

If VPU recover goes into an endless loop, it's because whatever was causing the video card to fail is still causing it to fail immediately after being reset. The most likely culprit would be overheating, if the card runs fine for awhile, but then freaks out until you give up on it, then runs fine again..

[DrBeast]

Well, Radeon cards aren't really "mini-barneques" like NVidia cards, especially older ones such as the 9600 you're using. I have the same card, 256MB Pro version by Gigabyte, and it runs overclocked by 50 MHz (both core and memory) with only a heatsink to take up the heat, and I haven't had any problems. It used to run on ever higher frequencies, but I got "polygon spikes" when I was playing The Movies, so I lowered them frequencies a bit and it's running smooth again. Well, only an occasional crash now and then but hey, what else would you expect from Windoze?

[Qosmic]

Sorry for the late reply. My whole computer decided it didn't want anything to do with me anymore. Everything except TS2 has worked fine for me, but now it suddenly seems it's the harddrive that is fried, since nothing is working properly since the day before yesterday, not even after reformatting it and doing a clean install of XP. Can't install anything, and it crashes all the time. So I hope these frequent crashes I've had lately is due to that too (I might be able to afford a new drive...). When I got the game, I didn't have any problems with it until about a month after I got uni. At first it was the money trees, too many going kaching at once would terminate the game, but once I knew that was it I worked around it, and the patch solved it completely. Then there was the overheating, which got better when cleaning the video card fan. These resent crashes, that happens all the time, is different. Before I only got crashes in play mode. Never in CAS, neighbourhood view, build mode, while saving etc. And certainly not this often. What happens is that I get an error message saying the game will terminate., I click ok (or whatever it says) and it throws me back at the desktop immidiately. The music goes on as usual and nothing seems to happen to the game until I click ok on the error message. Yes, I've had crashes ever since last spring, but I still don't think it's the video card drivers since I should've got these problems sooner after updating them if that was the case. Too much time has passed since then, imo. But that said, I'm so very far from being a computer expert that I can't be sure of anything.

I discovered something odd yesterday though. When running dxdiag (which tells me nothing is wrong...), it says "Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00 GHz (2 CPUs)" I went to look at System in my control panel, and it looks as if I really do have two CPUs (I have two identical entries under the CPU tab). It's a shame I didn't see this before the reformatting, as I don't know if this was the case before too. Does this means my computer thinks I really have two CPUs? Could this possibly be the seed of my problem, os is it simply a symptom of my harddrive losing it?