More Awesome Than You!

Recently, my sim game has started acting up again. It was alright for a while, but now is has started freezing again. I'm not quite sure what the problem is. I've tried deleting group.cache, I've also tried removing my downloads folder, but it still happens. I updated my drivers after it started happening, but that really didn't change a thing. My videocard is a Radeon 9250. Does anyone have any suggestions?

What are you doing when it freezes? In a lot, in the neighborhood, loading a lot?

Actually playing. There's no rhyme or reason to it, really. I could be taking a picture, telling my sims to pee, watching them in freewill...it just freezes up for no reason. It never freezes while loading though.

Is this just the game that's freezing, or windows itself?  How do you get out of it?
My gut instinct on this is heat.  Try running with the side of the box off.
Well maybe I would jump to that conclusion as my machine will not run with the sides on.

Usually only the game freezes. Since I play in windows mode, I can go to another window, then right click and close, although this takes a while to do. Other times, it can completely freeze, requiring me to use the power button to turn it off. I don't think it's the heat though. The computer doesn't feel paticularly hot. And the temperature displayed is 30 C, or is that a different thing entirely.

My game also randomly freezes for no apparent reason (usually for about 10-30 seconds).  I keep a book to hand so when it does this, I just start reading.  No great inconvenience but odd, it doesn't sound like the computer is working especially hard to load anything, and all background tasks are shut down.

Groups.cache is regularly around 120kb every time it regenerates.

Are you playing in a hood where you deleted all characters? I have noticed that in those hoods where I did the nuke before I added sims I want to play, the game will tend to freeze for a while anytime it needs an NPC. But if I am patient, it is fine.

Do you have any custom music in your game? The only time I have ever had random freezing was when I tried putting my own mp3's in. As soon as I took them out all was fine and I haven't had a problem since.

I just wanted to chime in here and clarify the issue of "freezing"  There is "freezing" and there is "slow game"  which some people incorrectly refer to as freezing, and there is a difference.

 Freezing is when the software has basically crashed (and there is a difference when your game crashes and when your hard drive crashes too, if your game crashes you can still do other tasks on your desktop, if its a hard drive crash you can't).When the software crashes its not going anywhere, or perhaps a dialog box with come up and say something about "terminating."   Freezing can be caused by a number of issues usually memory usuage problems, overheated cpu, file corruption, or file fragmentation and a desperate need for defragmenting your hard drive.  Freezing and crashing can also be cause by download files that cause serious file conflicts or a file itself is corrupted. 

A slow game is another matter.  A slow game is an indication that the game either hasn't the necessary processing or memory resources required for the game to run, or the game has to load too many files.  The folders that are usually the culprit of this is too many neighborhood files, too many thumbnail files and most often too many downloads in your download folder. Cleaning out these folders and reducing the number of files your game has to load can improve the performance of your game significantly.  Downloads can cause this, but its not necessarily that  you have a download file that conflicts with the game or corrupted, it might be just requiring or hogging too much of the memory that your game needs to run or incompatible with the game version you are using.  Consider being very conservative and extra careful when it comes to downloading stuff.  Lots not loading at all are caused by a download that isn't compatible with the game version you are using.

Hopefully this gives folks some information to help diagnose what there problems are.

Er, just to correct - that's a system crash, not a hard drive crash. Hard drive crashes are rare and terrible things, and mean that a platter or the platters in your hard drive literally CRASHED into something, thus rendering the drive unusable.

  And the data irretrievably gone. (unless you have loads of cash to pay a specialized firm) so a terrible thing indeed

Ah, so true, so true.  Having experienced that trauma on my office system, I now weekly backup my game on a DVD, my financial stuff on a jump drive (those are the only two important things on my home system) and made an "emergency" box containing all my apps, etc.   

Of course, that doesn't answer Lythdan's question.  What OS are you running?  Do you have a good set of utilities installed so you can check for invalid registry entries, etc.?  Is there plenty of room on your drive?  Does it freeze up if you play it in non-windows mode?

May I make a suggestion?  The next time you have it up and running, be sure to make a backup of your game files to external medium.  Shutting it down with the power button is what precisely  caused my office HD to crash and burn.  Windows 98 sucks.