More Awesome Than You!

I have no idea why this is happening at all, it wasn't yesterday and I've added nothing to the game, or to my system since, but my PC is rebooting when I try to load a neighbourhood. (Academie le Tour attached to a custom hood).

I've scanned for viruses, Malware, Adware, spyware and found nothing.  I've scanned for bad hd sectors, nothing, checked RAM for blechyness, nothing, updated video drivers, no change.

I don't know if it happens with any other hoods as this is the only one I've tried since it started (game was running, quit out to reboot, reload and this is what I get)

My current system specs are:

AMD Sempron 3300+
1GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9250 128meg Graphics

Have you tried removing all your downloads and just checking whether it still happens?  If it doesn't, you at least know it's something in your downloads, and can start adding them back slowly until you find the folder with the culprit.  If it's still happening, you could first try deleting the groups.cache file in your TheSims2 folder in My docs and letting the game generate a new one.  No luck, then I'd suggest before you return your downloads that you move your hoods out, then uninstall/reinstall your latest EP and see if that works.

If none of those things works, and you installed the new video drivers AFTER you got the problem, then I shouldn't think it's the drivers that are the problem, although sometimes upgrading can actually cause problems.  However, it doesn't honestly seem to me it's a problem with your PC, but something with the game itself, and reinstalling may solve it.  If not, then see if you have the problem with campuses in other neighbourhoods.  If you don't, then it seems it's just that neighbourhood,  and it may be that you just have too many character files.  You may have barista spam etc., and there are several hacks to prevent this kind of thing occurring, but once it has occurred, you'd need to open the neighbourhood in SimPE to find all these extra files.  If they have no relationships, just copy the file numbers down, close SimPE and delete those files from your characters folder.  Additional files which have relationships need to be treated a little more carefully.  You need to delete any memories that sims have of having met them, then delete the relationship itself.  Once the NPC, townie or dormie you want to delete has no relationships left, you can safely delete them.

A pc spontaneously rebooting itself is usually due to overheating of the CPU or VPU (video chip). Since the Sims is much more CPU intensive than video intensive, I'd put my money on that. Video/Sound driver issues normal will cause programs or the pc to hang or crash to desktop, but not cause a reboot, but it's possible if the driver is really bad & causes a major failure of the VPU. I believe your graphics card has the VPU recover feature from ATI that allows it to 'reboot' itself without restarting the whole pc, so I really doubt that's your problem.

Make sure all your case fans are running and are clean. You can also try running the pc with the side panel off for a while and see if that corrects the problem. If it does, you have poor air flow in the case.

Sorry, I should have said I've tried removing all CC and it still hapens, I've no had a chance to test other hoods and none of them have this problem, only the one campus.  I delete the groups.cache file pretty much everytime I closedown my game.

I have the barista fix and several other fixes from JMP, TJ and Crammyboy, so I doubt it's that, and this hood is only 3 months old, I don't play hard enough to cause a BFBVFS in that amount of time, I'm sure (well at least I hope).

Thanks for the very thorough information and help, but most of these things I was already aware of and tried.

Jeff, Thanks for the suggestion, but if it was an overheating issue, why would it be only happening in the one hood?  Every other hood I have loads, runs, and plays fine.  It could well be a heating issue I guess (I do run my machine a hella lot) and maybe I'm just being an idiot, but why would only that hood cause it?

I can't see it myself, I had the game constantly crashing back with just the original game, but it did it usually as soon as I tried to load it, and then it started to happen as soon as I tried to boot up at all (though not always, so I was able to save all my games and downloads etc.) and it turned out to be problems with the CPU, motherboard and the power thingymajig just not being able to handle the updated video card and extra RAM, so I had to have another upgrade!

But if it's just the one hood, then I think the problem has to be somewhere in that hood!  so, does it happen as soon as you try to load the hood, or when you try to load a house, - exactly at what point it happens could be important in pinpointing the cause.

Actually it's solved itself aparently *shrugs*

What was happening was it would load the hood screen then without me doing anything it would reboot after about five seconds.

I moved all my downloads out and it was still happening, so I put them back in, and now it's fine.  go figure.  ???

I'd say in that case it had something to do with the amount of custom content in your hood, and if the downloads weren't actually available, then maybe that was the problem (did you have any downloaded items in the neighbourhood screen itself?) as the game just screwed up trying to find stuff that wasn't there.

Actually apart from the skins on the sims themselves (Which it wasn't giving me a chance to load) there is no CC in that campus at all.

It happened, I took all CC out of my game, it happened again, I put all CC back in, it stopped happening.

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me, but I'm sure there probably is an explanation somewhere.

I'm sure there is, but it has me beat!

My son had something similar happen to his neighborhood (right after this, I moved my game to my own account so he could tear his game up however he wants ;). He couldn't load his neighborhood from the main screen at all, the computer would reboot. If he loaded my neighborhood, or a Maxis hood we weren't playing first, then switched to his, it would load fine. I've no idea what he had done to it, but it was right after he added a whole bunch of *huge* houses, so I always thought it was something in one of the houses (2 different pyramids is what I remember most).

The other thing that can cause a spontaneous reboot is insufficient power. Most off-the-shelf PCs have cheap, inadequate power supplies.

If it appears random, it's probably a heat or power problem. One thing you can try is kicking it.

If you have XP, it has this little 'feature' that, when certain errors occur (those bad enough to cause a bluescreen), reboots the computer. It's supposed to be useful but instead makes troubleshooting fabulously difficult! Here (http://www.theeldergeek.com/auto_reboot_on_system_crash.htm) is some good information about what it is and how to disable it.

And like Pescado and Heg mentioned before, power and/or heating issues can cause reboots, too.

My computer, running XP, did this within a couple months of getting it.  I called tech support and they had me do a system restore to a point before the problem began.  I never had that problem again.  They explained that conflicts can cause it and so knowing exactly what it was would be important if it happened again, but otherwise to just move on and forget about it.