More Awesome Than You!

It's not entirely Sims2 related, but it does involve my game. I have a NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT.

My game has been rendered unplayable by consistent Blue Screen of Video Driver Death. Every time I start up Sims2, it'll load up a neighborhood, let me play one of the houses, then BOOM! Freeze, BSOVDD. It used to let me play for longer (20 minutes or so) before dying, but last night, I barely got three minutes into playing before the freeze. It always gives the error of nv4_disp.dll (which dxdiag lists as my main driver).

It started out of the blue- I'd been using these same drivers since I installed the new video card a couple of months ago, and they'd been fine, no blue screens, no errors. When it started, I updated the drivers, but it didn't help.

To compound matters, this error started popping up every time I started the computer:
(http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b7/emeirii/slierror.jpg)

Thing is, we've never had two video cards installed, and therefore, we can't figure out why this error started coming up when we hadn't changed anything. We don't have any options in the SLI menu to change anything.

Other games aren't crashing.

Would doing a complete reinstall help any? Could it be something in the game messing things up, or is something more serious wrong with my computer? I'm just at my wits end here.

The multi-gpu popup can be burninated with a simple registry hack available at nvidia support (http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php).


As for the BSOD, I'm not totally sure but I think it's related to this problem (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,3541.msg103226.html#msg103226).

In my experience, after installing a 7800GS (yep, still AGP), all hell broke loose! My game would freeze after some time playing, the maxis blue screen would appear with an hourglass, and then the monitor would start flashing between on/off states :o

There was still response from the OS, but using ctrl+alt+del was useless due to the flashing monitor bringing the task manager out of focus.

In a desperate attempt to save my game, I pressed the hibernate key. At that moment a series of error dialogs would appear stating something like "Error parsing value '' at line 903". After restarting, the flashing would resume again, so I had no choice other than shutting down the whole thing, causing a few hours of unsaved game to be lost  :'(

In the end, it was all solved by reverting the nvidia drivers back to the 81.98 version, the earliest to support my card.  :P

Edit: correcting spelling error before ElfPuddle "hybernates" me!

Well, I installed the 84.21 drivers, and it gave me almost 25 minutes of playing time before I got the BSOD. Got my hopes up, then crash and burn. I guess I'll have to go further back, though the reduction of graphics I got from going back to 84.21 (yes, everything was on high) makes me wonder why I paid all this money for a 7600 GT if my game's gonna end up looking like crap.  >:(

ETA: 84.21 seems to be as far back as the 7600GT is supported in the "Products Supported" list. Should I try older drivers anyway?

Son of ETA: My computer won't accept anything older than 84.21, so it seems I'm screwed. Why would my driver suddenly stop working, if it had been working fine for months? Could it be a bad download causing this? It seems unlikely, but... I'm at a loss as to what to do. My game is unplayable and I'm just frustrated beyond belief.

Could be bad RAM or something else in the system got corrupted. I have a 7600 GT here and it works fine.

Is there a way to test for that?

Run a RAM test program?

I'm afraid I'm rather technologically retarded. Is that something my computer already has, or do I need to download something? *shuffles off to google it*

It's either hardware or software. It's usually software, but software is not easy to diagnose. Normally, you just wipe the system and start from scratch in that case. If that doesn't work, then there is a hardware problem. Hardware problems that cause kernel malfunctions can be anywhere on the mobo (video, RAM, CPU, etc.).

I've got the 7300 and from the beginning i was getting the Blue Screen of Death,  updated drivers at which point i wasn't getting that, instead my game would freeze for a couple of mins then crash to desktop.   Also was getting that SLI msg, drove me up the wall.   I ended up re-installing the video card using the installation disk that came with it.  For the last 2 weeks, i've had no more problems. 

Thank you Theo  ;D Those links might help me. I have an annoying SLI pop up when I start the computer. I'll have hubby or my brother look at that help page and see if the fix will work for us.
My annoying message tells me something about SLI not working properly as I have disabled one of my graphics cards. Silly computer  :P I only ever had one graphics card. But what I did do (confession time) is update my video drivers to the new one 91.31.
I have updated the drivers previously and I think I did it right. Remove old drivers from add/remove program, reboot, turn off anti-virus, install new version.... Check EA Easy Info, it says they are there, play new game that needed the driver, it's all good. But everytime I start the computer now I get the annoying pop-up. 'Sigh' nothing is ever simple!

LOL! I had that dumb SLI message too. The registry hack killed it for me. Thanks Theo!  ;D