More Awesome Than You!

So, I've been reinstalling all of my programs/data/etc. on my new harddrive, and finally finished reinstalling all of TS2 (every EP minus BV, no stuff packs).  I only had to use torrents for the base game (lost my discs) and FT and AL (using the exact same torrents I used to get them the last time I installed them).  Except for the hard disk, everything about the computer is the same as it was the last time the game was installed and worked with no crashing.  One minor difference is that I've reorganized my stuff a bit, and the install ("Program Files") directories are now on a separate NTFS partition known to my computer as F:\ that is auto-mounted by Windows when it boots.  The My Documents folder is in the same place.  Also, I believe I never actually upgraded to SP3 before this reinstall.

Anyway, I copied my old The Sims 2 directory into the new My Documents\EA Games folder, and started it up.  Everything seems to be as usual, except that maybe a minute or so after the neighborhood has loaded I get a crash to desktop, claiming that there is a Direct3D error called "D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE".  I've googled around, and although I have yet to see a convincing account of anyone who has solved this problem, the general advice seems to be:
1.  Uninstall your drivers and then reinstall them.
2.  Reinstall DirectX 9.0c.
3.  If that didn't work, your graphics card is probably overheating and giving its death rattle.

I've tried 1 and 2, neither of which seem to work.  I deleted the cache files.  I've run dxdiag and run DirectX tests, and they all seem to work fine.  In order to test the eventuality of impending graphics card death and/or overheating, I ran HWMonitor while I started up the game, until the point when it crashed, and it reported that my graphics card got up to 69 degrees C.  I didn't know if this was hot enough to kill graphics cards, so as a control/test, I ran a graphics-intensive game with 3D animations for a few hours (with no problems) and HWMonitor reported that the graphics card heated up to 81 degrees C, without displaying any evidence of graphics card death rattle.

Anyone else have any ideas?  This has never happened while playing the game on this computer, until I reinstalled everything.  I suppose I could replace the new hard disk with the old hard disk and try and run the game from that, to verify that it's really something with the reinstall and not with the hardware, but that won't really help me any, as I'd rather not keep reinstalling Windows in slightly different ways as I wouldn't know where to start.

System details:
Dell Latitude D830 (a lappy, which I know is not supposed to work as a gaming computer, but I've never had any problems before, and still haven't had any problems with any non-TS2 games)
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20 Ghz
About 2 GB of RAM

Graphics card is NVidia Quadro NVS 135M with 256 MB of memory
Driver is the (presumably latest) one that you get when you put these specs into the NVidia website.

Windows XP Pro, SP3

If it matters, I have 100 GB of disk space for Windoze, 200 for drive F:\, and 300 more, about 20-30 of which is in an EXT3 partition for linux and the rest being unallocated.

I was having this issue and I reinstalled drivers and DirectX and also cleaned up my computer.  I had not realized that my lazy and indiscriminate use of Timesnapper had left me with about 1.5 of an original 150Gb on the relevant hard drive. Also I had an awful lot of extra crud in the downloads folder (graphics files of things I'm recoloring because I'm too lazy to go back and forth between different directories while in SimPe, text files I forgot to throw out when I installed stuff, and so on).


You probably keep your computer better groomed than I do, but it may be worthwhile to check that out.

Doesn't this error message just mean "Error message not available?"  That's what I thought it meant.  Though at first I thought it meant that the 3D rendering wasn't available.

The impression I get is that it means that 3D rendering isn't available (or at least, the game doesn't think it is).  The D3DERR_WHATEVER format exists for other 3D-related errors as well.

As for your comment about computer clutter, this is a completely new reinstall of my entire hard drive.  Even if I did let my drive get that cluttered, it hasn't had any time to do so.

I am unable to help but I have been having that error and crash for months now, and couldn't find a solution. I just strongly suspect Nvidia.
 
My card is (and has always been) a Geforce 8600GT OC 256 MB. The latest drivers updates are my favourite suspect. They do bring even more unwanted shit and mess the registry with stupid launch-at-PC-boot stuff with each update, too.
I didn't change anything myself between now and the time when I wasn't experiencing these crashes, my games are still in C/program files. The problem is related to lag, though, since it started to happen on community lots (stupid post-graduation outings with groups of ten unknown idiots), and occasionally in big dorms and once in a full 5X5 residential lot, I think. Oh and on BV hotels, too.
It doesn't take much time to load the game or go to a community lot, so I don't think that my Downloads are a problem either. I did get rid of Fitness for all and Community skilling, thinking that maybe they add too much information to process at a time for my computer. But it didn't solve the problem and I just missed it too much so I reintroduced Fitness for all. It's hard to test though, because the crash appears occasionally, so I can never easily say if something I tried was helpful or not.
 
Obviously, I did reinstall the drivers, and a few more since, because new updates were released. I tried the clean reinstall, too. I also reinstalled Direct X. I cleaned everything I could think of, and looked for everything I could find that had a driver update released. So now my computer is super clean :p I tried this "can you run it" site and I'm supposed to be able to play TS2 and even TS3 perfectly, but I still get that problem sometimes. So I just save a lot and rush home if something important happens on a community lot, since I'm afraid a crash might eat it.

I am actually kind of happy, but just a little bit, that a distinguished MATY-member with such a shiny avatar seems to be having a similar problem. Chances for said problem to be solved seem to have incredibly increased.

As a follow-up to this problem, in case anyone else is still having it:

I made another attempt to play my game this weekend, and for whatever reason, this time it managed to go without crashing for long enough for me to actually load a lot and play it for a short time, during which I noticed strange graphical glitches that I had never seen before - sometimes during an animation, all the sims on the lot would disappear for several seconds, there were odd invisible vortexes that caused sims that passed behind them to become invisible or partially invisible, and sims who walked through a door while walls were up continued to appear on the screen despite being on the other side of the wall.  After confirming that the crash still happened, I loaded the game again and opened the graphics options, and turned everything down to the lowest setting, after which point the glitches stopped happening, the crash stopped happening, and performance was noticeably improved (and it has been noticeably worse since the new harddrive).  (I later turned back on high sim detail and reflections, with no noticeable changes.)  I conclude that the error is possibly just an indicator of generalized video card lameness rather than some kind of fatal directX problem.  (As for why my video card has suddenly become lame, this is a question for the people who sold me my three-year hardware warranty.)