More Awesome Than You!

all of a sudden today I've noticed that my game is grinding big-time on my computer...the last time I played it a few days ago, the maximum memory usage it would take was roughly 325k and my CPU would be at about 65-75%...I don't play with the graphics turned right up or anything like that, but when I loaded up this time I noticed that my CPU is running at 100% consistently and the memory usage for the game is running MUCH higher at roughly 450k-475k (which is making it so sluggish it's practically unplayable).

I know that resources differ from computer to computer so for comparison, a firefox window that I've had open for some 5+ hours at a time will tend to run at 115-150k memory usage and hover at around 5-10% CPU. I have all the EPs and SPs installed, I'm running windows XP on an Intel Celeron 2.8 gig with 2 gig DDR2 ram - which ordinarily suits the game fine. I haven't installed any new programs either and the rest of my computer's background tasks are all operating as normal for my computer...

anyone have any ideas for what could have suddenly caused the game to become a resource black hole and have any idea of how I could fix it? I haven't downloaded or added any custom content since the last time I played and I don't have all that much custom content at all because I recently cleaned out my downloads folder completely and started my neighbourhoods from scratch...

It may not be the game, as such, just something else that's running in the background that becomes apparent while you're playing the game.  I'd do a long search for a virus or spyware.

I've tried that today, did a big virus scan and everything came up clean, spyware was the same way. :-\ I've even tried disabling background tasks because I know that Nortons can be a resource hog when it updates, but it's definitely the game that is sucking the resources....I opened up my system info while I had the game running to check it, and the CPU is flicking constantly around 90+ in the field for the game's process.

So, do you have Auto patch enabled on your game? Do you have BV? Do you have it firewalled and made sure that the game is not trying to access the Internet?

I have the patched BV version with the fairlight crack to bypass securom, I have auto-patch disabled, it's firewalled and not attempting to access the net at all.

eta: bodyshop AND the game itself now gets a "the application has crashed and will terminate" error immediately when I try and run it...for some reason my game seems to be choosing to die a horrible death.

I might be wrong, but I think Fairlight's crack is only for unpatched games. This could be your problem.

Fairlight did release the patched version of the crack.

Reinstall BV without the patch and use YASU without a cracked exe. The patch is worthless anyway.

If you use it without a cracked exe you will get Securom anyway. I should know. It's why I had it.

yeah, I patched and cracked immediately so that I could avoid getting securom.

I think I'm just gonna have to do a clean reinstall and gradually reintroduce downloads back into the game...it's been taken in a BFBVFS for now.