More Awesome Than You!

I have been having issues with my game since installing AL.  Sometimes I can have the game up for hours and it's fine, other times it's up for a couple of minutes and the graphics go all to hell.
First, the screen flickers and then the screen gets blocky and tiles.  Then the tiles will flashes through the different textures.  Icons from the control panel show up all over the screen and all sorts of other fantastic.  This only started after AL.
I have tried several different drivers and have current ones installed now.  I have had a problem with my laptop getting hot, so I use a program to force the fans on high and use an external fan base. 

Specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
T7250 @2.00GHz
Ram: 3GB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600m GT
Driver: 6.14.11.7792

What sort of power supply do you have?

This sounds like a video card malfuction. I saw the same sort of behavior when I had a videocard that was way too beefy for the laptop it was in and overheated multiple times a day. Most times when it overheated the motherboard would step in and force a shutdown, but over time the heat did its damage, and on random occasions the card would do this.

Eventually it would do nothing but this, and upon forcing the case open, one corner of the card itself was slagged from heat.

Does the graphical wierdness persist after exiting Sims? When my card was doing this, I would get the same sort of graphic barf on my desktop in Windows as well.

jolrei Dell PA-10 Model ADP-90-HB
                 Output 19.5V : 4.62 AMPS

MoonDragoness My laptop would get hot until I got that program and the external fans.  And the graphics barf (love that term) does not presist after shutting down the Sims.

The 8600s are part of the series of nVidia cards known to be defective (8300-8700, specifically).  They are particularly prone to overheating.  This is a problem in both the laptop versions as well as the standard PC versions - it's just a lot worse in laptops because laptops tend to have heating issues to begin with, and because there's little you can do in terms of aftermarket cooling to reduce the problems.

I've heard of them releasing driver updates but really all that does is ramp up the fan speed to try to alleviate some of the heating.  The cards themselves are doomed to failure.

Turn down graphics settings and resolution if you insist on playing high-graphics-strain games like TS2.  Get yourself a temperature monitor like SpeedFan to keep track of your temps and shut down before they get too hot to minimize damage.  Update your drivers to get the fan to run a little faster.  Get a laptop cooling pad to cool the laptop in general.  And don't be surprised if the graphics card fails.  AL does appear to run a lot harder than the previous EPs for some strange reason - I've got a very nice, shiny new PC and it's sluggish on mine.  I'm not the only one reporting it... so something must've changed between FT and AL that causes it to run harder.  If you're not a big player of other high-strain games you probably won't notice a whole lot of issue - and the damage that heat does to your card is a cumulative thing, so it's probably been building up to this point anyway.

If you can exchange your laptop at this point, do so.  If you can't, look into whether you can extend your warranty - the nVidia cards with that issue are already failing, and it's just a matter of time till yours does too, and in a laptop, that means the whole thing becomes a large, expensive brick.  And watch out for class action lawsuits about it, because I would not be surprised if there's one upcoming.

Catbat, since you have a Dell I would follow this up with them.  They've already disclosed that several of their computers are affected by the nVidia issue and whether yours is included or not, I'd complain now rather than waiting for an outright failure of the graphics card.  Document the graphics corruption as best you can, and read up a little on the issue.  I think this account (http://apcmag.com/nvidia_disaster_thousands_of_gpus_faulty.htm) is reasonably fair, but google for yourself to see the range of opinion.

Although everyone who has an nVidia card manufactured within the last 2 years should be concerned, I would not go so far as to say that they are all destined to fail.  NVidia made an SEC filing 2 mos. ago to set aside $200 million for defective chips, and that is far too little to cover all chips produced in 8300 - 8700 range.  Of course they might have lied, but the financial and legal penalty for making a false claim to the SEC is much more serious than the cost of replacing the affected chips.  Since then they've been publicly pressured about the issue and repeatedly declared that the number of affected chips is small, which would expose them to shareholder lawsuits if they are lying.

There is already a class-action lawsuit (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080910-nvidia-sued-over-notebook-gpu-failures.html) against nVidia on behalf of its shareholders, which you should watch if you have an nVidia card.  The outcome of that will point the way to whether a lawsuit for consumers would be viable.