More Awesome Than You!

This weekend I dedicated myself to cutting back on my playing Sims2 while I'm working.  Rather than playing like normal, my new strategy is to send a robot to a community lot, power him down so I don't have to babysit, and let all of the other sims show up on the lot and make friends with each other.  I can just let it go on while I'm working, and it requires almost no attention from me (call it a nicotine patch for my sims addiction).  My problem is that after a few hours into this, I keep getting a pop-up message from Windows telling me that my virtual memory is low and that it's giving me more virtual memory to work with.  I only have a vague understanding about the concept of virtual memory, so I need some advice from the group.  Is this a problem?  Will it cause my computer or game to melt down?  Should I just ignore it?  Is there something I need to tweak on my computer that will help?  Is there something I can tweak on my game that will help?  Should I finally get a better job so I can finally afford a better computer?

This might help: http://tg.sims2techguide.net/guide.php?g=25

Since you don't seem to care about "babysitting" any of the interractions going on, why not turn all the game settings way, way down, as low as they will go?

Without knowing what kind of computer you have (and video card, RAM, etc) it's impossible to say if you need a better one. You probably just need to get more RAM.

Normally I'm a huge babysitter, but this is a special circumstance. I'm addicted to playing when I'm supposed to be working, and an eight hour work day is taking me about twelve hours because of it. This little scheme of mine is a way to satisfy the addiction in a way that forces me to leave the game alone and get some work done for a change (and it's nice not to have to bother building up friendships for job advancements as well).

Frankly I don't know much about the specifications of my computer. It's actually my wife's laptop from college, about three.5 years old, and I've never bothered to look them up. It handles the game mostly fine most of the time, and until I can find a better job I can't afford to buy a better computer or even upgrade this one.

The thing that confuses me most about the virtual memory message is that I often have the game loaded for up to twelve hours some days (playing off and on), and have sometimes binge-played for over six hours at a time on weekends, but have never seen this message before. I don't know if saving the game, (which can't be done on the community lots where i'm doing this) somehow consolidates the virtual memory into the regular game files and clears it out, or if there's something entirely else going on here.

Are you running other programs while running the game? The game hates that. Or, I guess I should say, computers hate that. I get "out of memory" messages when I use Photoshop while playing the game, and I have 4GB of RAM. When I had less RAM, I used to get warnings about low memory when I was using IM or surfing the web while the game was running.

Since you have a laptop, upgrading RAM or anything else is probably not an option. Cheaper to get a new computer. I doubt that a 5 year old laptop is all that great... but I guess if it plays the game it at least meets the minimum requirements.

I don't know if this works the same for laptops, but you should be able to find out about your hardware by clicking the Start button, selecting Run, and typing dxdiag in the box. This will give you all the info you want. Post it here and someone might be able to help you further. The other option is to use the EAsy Info program that was installed on your computer when you installed Sims 2. You should be able to find it in the Support folder in the same place that Sims 2 is installed, such as C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\Support\

I don't think it's RAM that's your issue in this case SaraMK, because I have 2GB RAM and I can run multiple things with sims going in minimised mode. Like Word, music, burning CDs, surfing the net and so on. I sometimes have a reflexive game running too. I do have a fast processor though and the sims is a processor intensive game.

Yeah, the processor on this computer is a bottleneck. Could be that.

It never does it unless I'm running Photoshop with the game at the same time, so it doesn't bug me that much. I also multi-task quite a bit, and usually have uTorrent, an mp3 player, and Firefox running at the same time.

Here's the tweak you need:  http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=308

Cacheman - discussed throughly at the "updating your computer" sticky.

I'm running the free version here at the office (sucky Win 98) and at home (XP).

The way I understnad it (please inform me if I'm wrong), any thing you've done that isn't saved gets stuck in your RAM and virtual memory. Since you've just let it run for a long time, the game has a bunch of new relationships to write down. If you save it every so often, this won't happen. Getting more RAM would also solve the problem.

I figured it may be something like that too, because it never happens when I binge play while saving constantly.  I used to do something like this several EPs ago and didn't have any problem, but these days my game is considerably more complicated.  I tried creating a business so I would have the option to save, and I left it running when I went jogging (no pun intended) and it happened while I was gone.  I guess I just left it too long.  The game was still running just fine, but I has this obnoxious blinking word balloon telling me that the computer was unhappy.  My concern is that, despite the game running like normal, this might break my game or melt down my system.

There's a decent tutorial on SimWardrobe (http://148.122.173.174/pplace/Windows_XP_Game_Optimization_Tips.htm) that explains things in a bit more detail than the one SaraMK linked.  I think it's fairly well written for a non-technical audience, if you're curious why you get that virtual memory issue.

Ste

So Ste, for lazy witches that don't want to read tutorials, does saving the sims frequently do any good?  :P

Yes. It flushes the crap that the game is storing to disk so it no longer needs to be held in memory/virtual memory.

Aha, that's what I was hoping someone would say. I save about twice a sim day, just because I hate having to replay anything, and because I just can't help saving frequently. In fact I get twitchy during programmes where I can't save when I want.  ;D I hated that EA disabled the Ctrl S for save in the sims 2.

PS I never did lot jumping, it seemed too messy file-wise, as if some things wouldn't be finished off and written to the file before opening another load of data. Seemed like a dodgy proposition to me, I prefer to return to the hood view and finish with the current file(s) before opening a new lot.