More Awesome Than You!

I'm ready for a change with my Sims2 game, so I'm preparing to get up to date with a lot of the expansions & packs I don't have yet and start my neighborhoods anew. I'm also going to take this opportunity to cull a lot of trash out of my Downloads folders & start out better organized. I'm not sure if I should do a total uninstall/reinstall of my game, or just delete my neighborhoods and let the game regenerate them, then install new EPs after that. Any advice on how to best go about starting fresh, and on ways to make my Downloads culling go smoother is appreciated. With over 10k custom items in my game right now, I'd much rather pare down the collection I have now than just start over downloading stuff from scratch (except hacks that need new versions to work with the new EPs I install). Right now I have Uni & NL, so I'm looking to add FFS, GL, OFB and Pets (not sure about any of the Holiday packs yet). Thanks in advance!

Jen

My non-awesome advice is to take out your downloads folder, lots, saved sims, and anything else you want to save then uninstall everything. Reinstall a completely clean game. Next, send all your downloads through Clean Installer (and the WTF Editor as well in need be). Remove all hacks. Completely. Then go redownload the newest versions of the ones you love.

How much hard drive space do you have on the partition where My Documents resides?

If it's a lot, just rename your "The Sims 2" folder and let the game regenerate it.  
If you've got another partition with a lot of space, use the right mouse button to drag the folder to that partition and pick "Move."  The drive will whirr for a while.  Let it do its thing.

At this point, if you ever want anything from it, you've got a full backup.  You can also use that old folder for storage of new stuff that you download, but don't want to play with right now.

If the software itself is running fine, don't tempt fate by reinstalling.

Well, this is where I am at the moment... (and BTW, thanks for giving me your time)

I play Sims2 on a PC that I basically use only for that purpose. I rarely even download content on that machine. I usually troll the net on my laptop while watching TV for stuff to add to my game. Then I move stuff to the PC over my internal network when the folder on my laptop starts filling up or there's something I want to use right away. In preparation for this new start, I made a copy of my current Downloads folder on my laptop & I'm sorting content by creator to perhaps make things easier to cull. I intend to download new versions of all my hacks, if necessary. I have no interest in saving my current neighborhood or characters or even downloaded lots to go back to, as far as I'm concerned they can be nuked. This will probably help me when culling my downloads, since I don't have to worry that some sim or lot in-game is using content I don't want anymore. Right now I'm doing as much organizing of the Downloads folder as I can without using SimPE or CleanInstaller to see what stuff with nonsense filenames are (my laptop is a Mac), and then I'll re-copy the organized folder later to my PC so I can get a better idea of what the non-categorized stuff is. I'll pull the content I know I want (like the SimSquirts clothes, and my default eye/skin replacements) stick them in the clean game, and then start going through the rest bit by bit, seeing what I can live without. I know I have a bunch of stuff that I downloaded right when the game came out that I think looks like crap compared to newer stuff, but deleting such content in-game always seemed a huge drain of time with the amount of stuff I knew I had to look through.

I'm still not sure whether it's worth the bother to totally clean install or to just trash my neighborhoods & start over from the Maxis templates. Then again, I would like to see the game generate Townies/NPCs using the face (and name) template replacements I have, do I have to wipe the new Townies out in a fresh neighborhood for them to start generating with non-Maxis faces/names? Sigh, so many questions...

Oh, also...I'm thinking I might get hold off on Pets for a bit, but start with FFS, GL & OFB. It shouldn't be so bad to backup the neighborhood before installing Pets and then upgrade hacks again if necessary? I just don't want to have to wait to get all of the EPs before I can start with the cull/reinstall project now that I've got the urge.

Thanks again for helping!

Jen

EDIT: I should probably mention that I've had some issues trying to install/play certain lots I've downloaded (specifically ones from WickedSims, even though they don't appear to require EPs I don't have). My game will crash to the desktop inevitably upon trying to load these lots, if not when selecting them in the Lot Bin. I'm thinking maybe a clean install might help me clear out a problem if its with my game rather than the lots themselves. Or would the same purpose be served by deleting the lots & neighborhoods & letting the game regen?

My advice, nuke it all. You dont need to reinstall the game, just give youself a clean slate to work with, then you can be more diligent about the stuff you do add back in. In fact, try playing all the games with nothing in for a while, then add back in your hacks that have been updated and play with that for a while. Then when you get bored, start adding CC back in, carefully and well organized complete with their own folders and pictures. Of course you can just save off all your junk to a disk, that way if there is something you absolutely must have you can find it and add it back, but odds are, there will be little you actually put back in, its just a security blanket. I did that only because at the time I had dialup and the thought of redownloading anything was icky, even with flashget, overnight lol. Realistically though, very little that I have on disk ever went back in and I found it was easier just to go find it and dl it again, being very careful about what I actually put back into the game.

I used to run my game with about 14g all the time, I am now down to 4.5g (13k files in 863 folders) now and perfectly content and organized, and thats only through nuking it all and starting over basically with each EP since NL.

i got bored the other night and reformatted my laptop. i love doing it! i have since installed all my sims stuff except pets (coz it sux!) and it runs so pretty! i haven't redownloaded my Awesomeware yet but will tonight.
i'm kinda anal about what i download and save it all in seperate folders so i can take out things i don't like after i download them.

I've been going through and organizing and deleting ugly/broken items too. What I would REALLY kill for is a program out of game that would load hair and clothing so I could view em as they look IN GAME without loading the game, so I could delete them faster. Is there a plugin for simpe or something? I've been deleting hair IN GAME for the past two weeks [started with about 2500 files in my HAIR folder], and it's just rediculous. I want to play, not spend a million years just deleting ugly stuff.

You can preview clothing and genetics in Body Shop. It is located in the /CSBin/ program files directory of your most recent expansion or stuff pack named TS2BodyShop.exe.
Base game path listed below. Change bold folder to latest pack name. For example "The Sims 2 Pets", "The Sims 2 Glamour Life Stuff" or "The Sims 2 Open For Business"

"C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\CSBin\TS2BodyShop.exe"

Problem with previewing/culling hair in  BodyShop (IMHO, of course) is that hair isn't animated, even if it is in-game. How custom hair animates (or doesn't) always plays a big part in whether I'll want to keep it in my game, and not being able to see that aspect of it in BodyShop is hugely annoying.

Plus, BodyShop doesn't really count as faster method compared to deleting custom content in game.

In another thread, someone wished for a mod/program/whatever, that would at least stop the pages flipping back to the first one after you deleted something.
That would really be great, unfortunately it seems impossible.

I was just gonna say that. ^_^ Yeah, I think the MOST time consuming part is having to flip back to where you left off. When you have like 200 pages of hairs to go through and it keeps going back to page 1 every stinkin time, it gets kinda draining.

Using bodyshop is just as bad as loading the game for me. It loads about as slow, plus, the lack of animation. I like to be able to tell limp hair from animated. But yeah, this will probably never happen. But I don't see how it can be done for objects, and yet not for heads/bodies.

I think I need to give it up and start over.  I dread loading my game b/c it takes so long.

I was beta testing Inteen and in doing so I did it with a fresh game, no downloads whatsoever...it was awesome how fast the game loaded and I really didn't miss that much stuff at all.

One of my beta testers told me once it took over 30 minutes to load her game.  I remember asking her once, "Hey, could you drop this into your game 'real quick' and restart?" and she replied, "Restart?  Do you have any idea what you are asking?!"

Anyway, if you have 3 or more expansions and are even a modest content junkie, anything less than 1Gig of RAM is a non-starter IMO.

Thanks for changing my Christmas wishlist ;)
/me adds the 2 GB RAM sticks to upgrade to 4 GB in total

A couple weeks before Pets came out, I had to reinstall my whole game. I'd made a backup of my storytelling neighborhood and put it back in as-is. Stupidity on my part. Like an idiot, I'd been moving sims and households from hood to hood for my own amusement - blissfully unaware of the BFBVFS I was setting myself up for. I found a good tutorial here for making clean start-up hoods, discovered the wonderful anti-respawning and anti-redundancy hacks, and best of all, a (working!) tutorial from SaraMK for how to combine all 3 Maxis hoods into one - which is what I was trying to do with my inter-hood moving in the first place. I made a clean break from my about-to-explode hood, and it's been nice having the faster lot loads and less problems. I've been trying to stick to 2x2 or smaller custom lots, as well, which also helps load times a lot on my laptop.

I've got a 1.7G downloads folder right now, but my game loads in under five minutes, so I feel the precautions on the side of cleanliness were well worth the small amounts of time and effort they took. I set up subfolders in the DL folder that match to the catalog sections, with extras for hacks, skintones, etc. and have been trying to put collections with more than one file into sub-sub-folders so that the next time I feel like culling, it'll be an easier matter of clearing out what I haven't used.

Dunno if there's anything in this rambling that you can use, yourself, but there's just things that have been making my gaming life easier.

I finally got around to picking up FFS, GL & OFB tonight, so its time to do the great uninstall/reinstall! I've been organizing my Downloads by creator on my laptop, and later I'll use Clean Installer on my PC to subfolder stuff by type before moving anything back into my game. I'm thinking of using SaraMKs townie-free neighborhood templates too, but I have to go back & read over the instructions before getting started with that. Any additional advice on how to start my new game off on the right foot is still appreciated! Wish me luck!

Mine probably takes a good 10 minutes to load now..possibly 15...I'm not really sure b/c I do other stuff while it is loading..but yeah that's pretty sad.  I have a huge amount of CC though and most of it needs to be sorted through and a lot of it needs deleted.  With no CC is loads in like under a minute.

Yeah I've been testing out my shiney recolors and others I've DLed, To make this go smoother I took out my Dl folder and it was amazing the difference in load times. It's sad!
Also been trying to organize my CC but it's tough as I need to delete most things In Game so I can really tell how it looks. I too wish they'd make it so you wouldn't have to start from the beginning again in the section you're in!
I got a question though, can you rename .package files without damaging the file? Or do you have to keep the crappy name it has? I really wish people could name their files better it'd help in keeping my DL folder organized.

Change the names Chami

I just recently had to reformat my computer and so decided to start fresh with the sims since it had been taking 20+ minutes to load and I hadn't been playing. I just put my favorite CC back in -- the Awesome hacks, Targa's elevators, objects/walls/floors/skins from Holy Simoly, objects/skins from Mermaid Cove, default replacements/makeup/walls/floors from Lyran's, clothes by Fanseelamb, the child/toddler converted hairs by Melodie9, and a few other odds&ends. The game loads in a snap now and I don't even miss the old stuff.