More Awesome Than You!

Has anyone had problems with Sims and Vista? When I take a screenshot the hard drive lights up, the sound studders and eventually quits. About a minute latter the sound comes back and things slowly get back to normal.  Second time if I take a screenshot it's usually goes without a hitch.  Although if it still hiccups I might as well quit and restart the computer.  If I forget to take a snapshot, and save... I might as well go for a walk.

My guess is drivers, even after updating and replacing the drive with a new SATA drive, still hiccuping bad.  I would like to eliminate the possibility of a game problem.

I run S2 on Vista HP 32 bit with no problems to date.  It's possible your game stalls during the first screen shot because Windows detects a 3rd party program initiating a write procedure and flips out.  If you have not done so, consider disabling UAC.  Also, it never hurts to run your trusted applications in administrator mode.

Your hard drive is controlled by your BIOS more than drivers, so make sure you have the current revision for your motherboard.  If your computer is from a system builder (like Dell) you can usually check for the latest BIOS on the support page. 

Out of curiosity, is this the only time you experience the minute hang ups?  If you simply right click and create a new text document, does the computer behave normally?

I could swear I've had it happen to a few other apps, but I'm guessing most of them were due to video driver issues. Oh ya, I was just playing wheel of time earlier this week, got in the mood for it, occasional when you'd launch it, it'd just stall out launching and I'd just reset the computer.

I've updated the bios and disabled uac. I thought I had fixed it, but it reared its ugly head again. Jmicron controller (for the sata/ide/raid controlller) seems to be problematic for vista, although I haven't found any other similar problems with google. I should see if it works better in 64bit version, but I highly doubt it.

btw, it's a ASUS P5B-Deluxe.