Skadi thanks for the tip.

For the first time ever, my pc did not sound like a jet engine about to take off trying to load the game. 
I'd often wondered why it seemed to be having so much trouble with Sims when it can cope with other, far more graphic intensive games more easily.

I've lurked on this forum for a long time.

People here are helpful.  Usually I only need to lurk as I can find the information they provide for myself.  I reply if I think I can add something to the conversation, otherwise I shut up and go about my business.

If other visitors would help themselves and do the same, there wouldn't be any drama, would there. 
I'm glad that the forum regulars go for the throat.  I'm sick of seeing everything in our world dumbed down for the lowest common denominator.  I'm all for taking warning labels off everything and letting nature take it's course.

I've personally been having the random ctd happening before I got showtime, so it's not something new and bad they've just introduced, their code has always been sloppy 

I have an nvidia gtx 470 and it randomly locks up and then it makes a clicking noise and all the lag catches up.  Pretty sure it's on its last legs.  I pulled everything out a few weeks ago and cleaned out the heatsink etc, you could have fried an egg on the cpu it was so bad.  I am pretty convinced my CTD's are caused by my motherboard/gfx card getting old and failing.  I plan on rebuilding my pc from scratch in the next few weeks so it will be interesting to see how it fares on a beefy new rig.

The only issue I've noticed so far is with the sound shutting off randomly.  No lag here.

Running atm with just awesome mod, my cc folder is pulled.

I was having issues with some of NRAAS stuff, with the portaits all being highlighted and not selecting the active sim properly, but it didn't seem to be portrait panel causing it. 
I've pulled it all until I can single out the problem.

latest version has fixed my crashing issues, thank you Pescado for your work

same problem here. Random CTD after a few seconds of playing.  It doesn't appear to be AM since there's no error messages, but it does work fine with no mods running at all 

Everything patched. Latest version of AM. I have an Nvidia GTX 470, with latest drivers, so more than enough to handle the Sims. 

yeah the public transport and no car spaces is kind of a mess, you can't put a bike rack outside your apartment either due to the build restrictions.

I found the easiest workaround so far was to buy a bike rack, plonk it down in the middle of the unit, buy a pushbike, then drag the bike into the sims inventory and delete the bike rack.

I did a test of two sims that live at the same apartment and sent them to a club on the other side of town. 
The one that took the bike got there significantly faster than the sim that took the cab/subway/walk etc.

Nope not AM. It's happening as base game fail for me.

I have AM pulled unti it moved from test to live so my cc folder is waiting patiently on my desktop. 

Also has anyone noticed a lot of sims peeing themselves with perfectly good terlets on the community lots?  It is kind of amusing.  Clearly my sims celebrity power is too overwhelming for them to route to the bathroom.

My drummer never receives a tip when using "play for tips"

I've tried it in a few locations, some where other people are playing, others where she's the only sim with an instrument, and she gets flat out ignored universally.

Taking her bf sim the guitarist netted him several hundred in a short time, and her drum skill is higher than his guitar skills.

Itsuitakeda, I can definitely confirm that there's nothing new regarding CAW.

I have an official cd I bought yesterday of Late Night, all it does it it's usual small update to the latest version, and then installs the expansion.

If there's something to do with CAW I can only assume that the people that created that particular torrent added it in.

Like you, I'd be not inclined to believe they'd add it with expansion files, especially since CAW is its own separate entity.

Donated $50. Worth it to be able to play the game the way it should have been coded in the first place.
All your hard work El Presidente is much appreciated.

my pc specs are almost identical to wizard_merlin, he just has a little more ram than my 6gigs, but same gpu core etc etc. aka more than enough for the sims.

I too have experienced this random freeze up...on the rare occasion it rights itself after about 30 seconds, 99% of the time I'm forced to end the process via the task manager.

It's most prevalent when I've hit fast forward, or in a world that I've been playing for a while, and then after restarting the game it's not a repeatable crash and will happen again down the track at some other seemingly random time.

I was under the impression that it was a result of a bad sim, or bad pathing or something eventually going pear shaped in game and the game just hanging as it tries to figure out what the hell it's supposed to be doing, and it has nothing to do with my pc specs.

The game will never crash if I've left it in build mode, have 300 other programs running in the background or on my other monitor etc and disappeared away from the pc for hours and then come back, it's only when the game is live and the sims are doing their thing that it will randomly choke.

I've just accepted this is a part of ea's flaking programming, and saving reguarly and doing a fixall every now and then and me visually poking around the neighbourhood to reset any dodgy looking sims seems to limit it to a minimum.

Just don't do what I did, I had a female sim marry a chinese guy while on holiday there.

I switched chars to the male to do the proposing since I wanted her to have his surname.

Cut a long story short, hilarity ensued, and the Chinese dude and his elderly grouchy mum ended up finishing the holiday bar timer and disappearing back to riverview, and she got stuck in a crappy little house flagged as a local, with no ability to go home or leave.  It was pretty amusing, it felt as though she'd been used for a visa and then dumped.