AAAH!

Ok, so I've figured out something of a workaround this problem for now.

University results for each semester are released at some point (I keep forgetting to check the time) each Monday.  So I rotate between households early on a Monday morning (usually around 3am when all the household members should be home).  When I come back to my uni household, even though I haven't played them for around 10 sim weeks by this time, their grades come out at some point on Monday, they re-enrol and we continue with their merry studies until 3am the next Monday.  If I stuff up and the grades come out before I've swapped over, I'll have to babysit them for another week.  Haven't stuffed up the rotation yet but never underestimate my ability to lose track of time.

It goes like this:

Uni House - join them 3am Monday morning, if they're new they start their classes on the Tuesday.  If they're continuing they get their grades and an opportunity to re-enrol.  If you don't re-enrol straight away they lose whatever scholarships they had on admission, even if you then re-enrol them later.  They then start their next semester on the Tuesday and away we go.  Classes, homework, term papers, presentations, blah blah blah. 

3am Monday - SWITCH! Go through the other families, then come back.  They get their grades and re-enrol. 

Rinse, repeat.


Also, YES, this sucks.  I've simply kept some sims living in the family home to study to avoid this.  College experience?  WHAT COLLEGE EXPERIENCE!?  IT'S A PANDEMIC DAMMIT.  STAY HOME.  Pixellated brats.

Huzzah, I am not dead and all that.

So I've somehow found myself actually kinda getting into TS4. Out of sheer laziness, I haven't gotten any mods as of yet. I've managed to change the options so I can mostly do rotational gameplay and not have other played houses age up and DIE ON ME, but I've hit a point where I have sims at University, and while they might not age while I'm playing other households, the University term goes on and if I haven't played their house and micromanaged their studies like the slave driver I am, they fail their subjects and go on academic probation.

Has there been a mod developed anywhere so University gameplay can pause while we're off playing other houses? At this point if I want to keep things under control I need to keep all my students in one dorm at only Britechester and thats getting a little manic even with only three sims doing three subjects each.

Interesting.  I haven't been paying much attention to sim stuff lately (stupid meatspace life), but I have been getting a lot of CTD since.... some time after getting Pets.  Maybe after patching?  I forget.

ANYWAY, I started a new neighbourhood yesterday and spent a good hour or so plopping LN, Pets, and Ambitions lots down (these are the only EPs I have at the moment, and if I can't play, then I'm unlikely to want to get any more - YOU HEAR THAT, EAXIS?).  I spent a bit less than a sim day in the new neighbourhood today, and got a CTD.

CLA tells me the problem is a corrupt save.  Really?  On a brand new neighbourhood?  Most of the crashes seem to have this listed as a culprit, but really?  On a neighbourhood about two RL hours old?

There is a warning from a previous CTD log (oddly, though, not from this crash) that I may not have enough RAM (a miserable 2GB, whereas the PetsBox insists 1.5GB should be enough).  Will have to get the spousal unit to assist with acquiring more RAM.

Haven't even bothered arrquiring TS3.  The reports here and elsewhere indicate that it's just not that interesting.

Still plodding along in TS2, where for the first time I've actually gotten an entire neighbourhood and sub hoods into their third generation without either getting bored and starting from scratch or being bugged into oblivion by a new EP (yes, JM, I need to make more backups).

And Yeah to more Awesomeland!

(edited to fix my stupidity)

... I'd say about as stupid as your average BBSer.

I may have to get the fiance to arrquire this for me (he is much more adept at arring than I).  Seeing screenshots is one thing, but I suddenly have the desire to experience THE HORROR for myself.

In one respect, it might work nicely if I feel the need to play Legacy style.  Let those sims kill themselves off!  Oh, that reminds me: do townies respawn to replace those who have kicked the bucket?  I remember reading in one of the plethora of L&P that they would, and this idea made me sad.

Then again the fiance arrquired Splotch for me months ago and I still haven't gotten around to testing it out.

Yeah, kids can 'tease' toddlers.  Kids can also 'torment' other kids (as can teens and other teens) - as the want says, sometimes the only way to show you care is to make a royal nuisance of yourself.  Ok, maybe it doesn't say that exactly.  They barge up to the other sim, wave their arms in their faces, grab at them and run off.  If the target accepts, they run after the instigator and give back as good as they get, and the relationship moves upward.  Apparently the target can also refuse to play along, and turn into a giant puddle of tears.

I've not yet seen the second reaction to tormenting, even if they don't know or like each other.  Apparently my sims enjoy a bit of arm waving too much.

You know I almost agreed with you... except Windows 98 sucked arse.  Blue Screens of Death were so common I could almost set my watch to it.  Then the system practically imploded with 4 BSODs in 15 minutes, and convinced me to upgrade to Windows XP.

As for Vista... meh.  It's there.  Doesn't seem to be causing any problems.  Only annoyance was the 'Are you SURE you want to run that program you just clicked download, and then double clicked on?  Are you SURE about that?  Why don't we ask the administrator, who is you anyway?  Hi AdminYou!  Do you want to let You run this program that You downloaded and then double clicked on?  Yes?  Ok, we'll do that then.'  And that can be turned off.

Oh and when I was looking at new computers, pre-installed XP cost more than pre-installed Vista.

I have had a few pregnant sims in apartments (a few at the same time!) and I can't say I've had this problem.  I play each apartment for a sim day.

The only problem I've seen with having babbies in apartments is that when the babby is born and placed in a cot, when I go to the next apartment every man and his dog is trying to go to the apartment to hold the babby (but can't because the door is locked).  When they do go to the apartment to visit, the babby is lying on the floor near the door and the cot is unclickable.  They can pick the baby up and feed it though.  When I go back to the babby's apartment, he/she/it is safely back in the cot.

Obviously LFT diplomas aren't worth the pixels they are printed on

Or you could insert however many economy jokes you like here.

Actually, I have heard of this before... somewhere, a long time ago.  I'm assuming it was here; I'll go searching.

EDIT: hmm... nope, can't seem to find anything.  I will leave it to more awesome people and do some real work.

Well I'm going to take back what I said about M&G breaking my build mode.  I went back in and built a lovely apartment lot called Inola Flats as a test today.  Everything worked as per normal.  I'm going to put this one down to general computer weirdness somehow connected to the keyboard problem I had on closing the game yesterday.

I haven't retested body skilling yet though, we'll see eventually.

Ah HA!  I knew I'd seen it somewhere before.  Will get a fresh copy of alfixes.

ACK!  I broke down and bought M&G today (I had a gift card and it was half price ) and already have three problems.  (I installed a no-cd crack too, none of that SecuROM nastiness for me!)

First, I had a sim start doing yoga.  She had 3 body points and did yoga for all of five minutes and gained 5 extra body points by the time I stopped her.  I've seen this mentioned somewhere before but I'm buggered if I can remember where I saw it or how to stop it - if it can be stopped.

Second and probably more importantly, I can't place doors or windows.  I can select them in build mode but they won't come out into the world for me to place them.  I have no idea what could be causing this.  It was a brand new lot I had just placed so I'm completely stumped.  I was going to check out existing lots but I accidentally hit 'Exit' instead of going back to the neighbourhood and couldn't be bothered waiting for it to load again.

Thirdly, when I did exit from the game something had gone haywire with my keyboard (typing 'o' brought up a save dialog, hitting 'esc' brought up the start menu, weirdness like that).  Rebooting the computer fixed that problem - otherwise I'd be having a hell of a time trying to type this!!

Grrr.

Every romance and popularity sim used to get the want.  Occasionally I would get one of the other aspirations get a want to join, but typically only if they already knew someone else in a Greek House.

Now, nobody.  I'm not especially fussed, as I tend to just push my students through their studies to get them back into the main neighbourhood faster (Social life?  What is this?), but it does strike me as odd that nobody wants it anymore.

(edited to clarify a little better)

Just a note that I've been having the same problem, and I have Pes's Director's Cut (minus a few features I didn't feel the need for), and a swag of twojeff's hacks, but nothing that seems to be connected to this.

Yup, I had my first alien baby with blue eyes born the last time I visited Strangetown.  I then promptly deleted the neighbourhood because I've never really been a fan.

Ye Olde Prima Guide says there's a 50/50 chance that the baby will have human eyes.  I say it's more like 97/3 it'll have alien eyes.

I spotted one casing out the J'Adore Bakery owned by the Jacquets, or whatever they call themselves.  Game hasn't blowed up yet.

GAH!  WANT!  Except I am anti-Stuff Pack.  I can has dilemma?

I'm sure there are self sims far more worthy of death than Emma...

Does it work if Stupid Vecki-Type People ask?

No, it's meant to open a new command window - this one is in Administrator mode.


Oh, and this bit didn't work for me with the "del /F /AH *".  Instead I typed "del *.*".  That did the trick.  I'm pretty sure I made mention of that in my post... Sigh, I wrote all that for nothing... woe!  Alas!  Alack!

Just an annoyance on the pre-AL homes, especially the single story ones, they didn't have floors inserted on the level above because, well, there WAS no level above to concern yourself with!

As I go through the houses with this issue I just insert a ceiling/floor above, even if I have to cheat a little to afford it on the houses that are dirt poor.

Apologies for big long quotes in advance - this is what I had to do differently in the EVIL world of Vista.


This worked normally.


This also worked normally, aside from uaservice7.exe not appearing in the directory.  That could simply be a configuration thing (and I've seen it mentioned in thread so I'm not too distressed about it)
 

This was a little different.  Vista denied access to schedule running cmd as an adminstrator (this is where it protects you from yourself, because obviously, if you can enter the command as above, you're obviously going to do something which will make your computer asplode ).  Instead of going into Command prompt and then scheduling it to run as an administrator, click on the 'start' button, if cmd doesn't automatically come up in the list, type cmd in the search box, when it does appear, right click on it and choose 'Run as administrator'.


Instead of typing "del /F /AH *", because that didn't seem to delete the files, I typed "del *.*".  When I then ran a dir /a, the files were gone.  The Securom folder was then happy to be removed as per the above.


Yup.


N/A for me so don't know if there was anything different.


Yup.  This worked exactly the same.

Last night after playing off the no-cd, I idly went into Registry and noticed Securom had snuck back into the registry files.  However like I mentioned in my previous post it had no qualms about being deleted again, and didn't appear in my Application Data directories (yes, I made sure hidden files and folders were visible), so not sure if there's a problem there or not.

EDIT - Played again last night, Securom didn't find its way back in that time.  Vecki's inconsistent computer behaves inconsistently.

Open the cases up and blow out any dust.  Dust caused some crashing problems I had a while back because it meant the fan couldn't work properly - not quite the same as yours though.

Here's info on the NVIDIA crash bug: http://www.modthesims2.com/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:nVidia_Blue_Screen_Issue

When I had the second XP account, it was mainly because trying to load TS2 in the admin account took a good 20 minutes just to get to the neighbourhood screen.  The second account literally took 7 minutes to get from putting the disk in to getting into a lot, despite all of the CC I had.