Thanks for the advice everybody!  Now if you'll excuse me, I have a bunch of professors to kill.

Many months ago I asked everyone here to help me find a way to whittle the number of Uni professors in each neighborhood down to just four.  Apparently, for some %&#$ reason it's impossible to have less than two dozen of them, which sucks, but is a fact I (grudgingly) came to accept.

Now, for some reason that's way beyond my puny intellect, my game has decided to spawn a second batch of two dozen crappy-looking neighborhood-clogging professors.  This puts the number of professors in Mt. Awesomeville! at 48, and the number of other residents (including pets and townies) at 24.

First question... does anyone have any idea what may have caused the second batch of professors to spawn?  My best guess is that I mistakenly put a second copy of FrikaC's "Majors Made Easier" tool into my game, but I have no idea.  Has anyone seen and dealt with this before?

Second question... is there a quick, easy, painless, non-neighborhood-corrupting, non-gene-pool-corrupting way to eliminate the unmandatory professors?  Should I just load a bunch of them into a house, lift the house into the occupied houses bin, and send it to the trash can?  Should I have a professors-only cowplant party?  Is there a better way?

The game works just fine... the weak link here that's killing me is the CD drive built into this laptop going all pot-head on me.  Still, I put the blame for this problem squarely on those jerks out there in the production houses and tv stations who haven't hired me for large sums of money yet.

I bought Seasons a few days ago, but have yet to be able to enjoy it.  The only computer in the house that can handle Sims 2 is the wife's laptop from college, which is fast approaching its fourth birthday.  The poor thing struggles a little to keep up with everything the game wants to do, but is workable (though it gets so overheated that i had to buy a desk fan to blow on the computer just to keep it from shutting itself off in an act of self preservation).  Never mind that the first time I installed Seasons it decided to Uninstall Pets for me... a quick removal of all things Sims 2 and a ground-up reinstallation of everything solved that. 

My problem, and the reason I'm posting this, is that I can't get my computer to start the game for me.  Of the two to three dozen times I've tried starting Seasons it's only let me in twice.  Once I'm in everything works as well as can be expected for this computer, but getting it to load seems almost impossible.  What happens is that the computer starts loading the game as normal, but after the initial splash graphic disappears, the CD drive goes into some kind of stupor.  The LED for the CD drive won't go off, indicating that it thinks it's working, but the drive slows down into not-being-used-right-now mode.  While this is happening it's impossible to do anything other than move the cursor around the screen.  The only way to regain control of the computer is to eject the CD, which gives me the "you need to have the CD in the drive to play this game, you moron..." alert window.  This isn't the first time this has happened to me either.  It started when I bought Nightlife well over a year ago, and even persisted after a complete reformatting of the hard drive.  In the past I've usually been able to get into the game after a few tries, but now it seems to be next to impossible to get past this barrier.

I realize that this is probably a hardware problem, and that getting a new computer would solve this (and a whole slew of other problems) for me.  I'm hoping that someone out there knows of a way to make the hardware play nice with the game.  My other option is to just buy a new computer that works, but I'm not a wealthy man and can't afford to do that without the generous outpouring of donations from other members of this site.  I'm willing to take donations to the "Buy slurpeefiend a New Computer Fund" if any of you are interested in that (send me a pm and we'll talk about it).  If not, I'd be grateful for advice any of you could give me on how to get my game started, or how to quickly and easily raise the money for a new computer.

They could create one mafia-type boss who runs the whole neighborhood, and nobody gets promoted in this town unless "Frankie the Fink" says so.

Isn't that the definition of a boss, or just where I work?

By "lopsided" I mean personalities that are going to lead to behavior that will annoy me if I don't control their every move, and even then require some cheats to override other obnoxious stuff.  Maybe it would be easier to randomize all baby personalities as a matter of policy from now on, since in my real family none of us four child bear any personality resemblance to either of our parents or to each other.  Realism, and all that crap.

Thanks for the lead.  I was dreading having to dig through his whole catalog to find something like this.  I'd still rather have parents able to encourage all traits (on both sides of the meters), but this will have to do until I can actually learn modding and figure out how to make my daily affirmation mirror.

None of those either... same reason as above.

My approach to sims has always been to start a neighborhood, nuke its inhabitants, and build a bunch of my own sims.  After a few test neighborhoods I started one that was supposed to be my one and only neighborhood that I had absolute control over.  The whole neighborhood was wiped out in a freak accident.  I tried again, but this time I overpopulated my neighborhood and set it aside for a while.  I'm trying two new experiments in sims.  The first a neighborhood with all default characters and their babies, and only one playable family and their descendants (usually only one baby allowed per family, unless twins change that, then one lives a childless life).  The second is a neighborhood free of the crappy default characters, four families each allowed only two children per generation (none of this "multiply and replenish the hood" philosophy that clogged my old neighborhood).

Bottom line, I've never developed a neighborhood enough to have these kinds of relationships.  This is why I don't run for mayor in real life... all of my towns either blow up, burn to the ground, or are swept clean of life in an undesirable way.

For various reasons I've never been able to keep a neighborhood around long enough to actually produce some grandparents (i'm still working on trying to graduate my first batch of students from college for the fourth time now).  I hope one day to be able to create a modified mirror that will allow sims to encourage themselves into a new personality, but until then I'm looking for alternative ways to balance them out.

It would be interesting to see what kind of abomination you'd get by breeding these two with the therapist.

Is there a way to activate all of the "encourage" options so that sim parents can undo some of the severely lopsided personalities of their children, rather than being limited to encouraging only those attributes they as parents possess?  I like cheating as little as possible and don't want to resorting to an outright cheat like the InSimenator to do this.

I'll take whatever I can get.  Even a tutorial.  I know that there was one in the zip file they came in, but it was about one step above my head (incidentally, i finally created my first object... a painting with a "get the creeps" option and associated animation).


I scanned everything in that folder and couldn't find anything.  Most of the files were empty.  There were about three or four exception files about [something weird happened on this lot], and a few other files with a bazillion "ERROR,TSAudio,Failed to initialize sound" lines in them.

One of the pregnancies came and went with no trouble (other than being twins, which is a whole other headache).

I'm interested to see how they work out for me.  I want to alter the percentages so they're all the same, but the Pets version are only alterable in SimPE, and I'm not good enough to do that yet.

As seems to be the pattern of my life, I have discovered the depths of my own ignorance.  I thought regular woohoo could lead to pregnancy because it used to happen all the time in the past... a past when I used to use the infamous (more than famous?) "kitten killer" in my game, a practice I have since abandoned.  I'm going to try syberspunk's risky risky-woohoo cocktail to see if I like that better.  Thanks for your help dudes!

So you're telling me that my game has an attitude problem?  Is there any way to show it who moves the mouse in this relationship?

I've had a problem lately with sims not getting pregnant.  First of all, they never get pregnant from mere woohooing... ever.  I started two neighborhoods lately, and am trying a less "breed 'em like bunnies" approach to populating it. There are four married couples between the two neighborhoods.  Each couple has tried regular woohoo at least once per day (and up to four times per day), for twelve to fifteen days in a row with no resulting pregnancy in any of them.

As their days of fertility began slipping away I switched to using the "try for baby" option once per day.  Two of the couples are finally pregnant, but in both cases they showed jump bugs at conception.  One was in a bed (default, no cc), and the woman was suddenly standing next to the bed.  The other was in a car (also no cc), and both the man and woman were suddenly standing at the mailbox.

I tried a hack detection utility to see if there were any conflicting hacks in my downloads folder.  The only conflicts are the JM tippingfix -vs- twojeffs Busker Tipping Hack (which should be compatible), and JM's nostrayrespawn -vs- Shaklin's no stray sign, and Shaklin's no stray sign -vs- DJS's wolf attraction sign.  I've looked through my downloads folder and didn't see anything that looked like it would affect pregnancy, at least getting pregnant.  I have about 2/3 of the mods from this site, some Squinge stuff to stop annoyances (mostly no autonomy and business stuff), and a few more from those who seem to have good reputations as reliable and knowledgeable mod-makers here and at MTS2.

I can't be sure when this started, but I didn't have this problem before OFB/Pets (both of which i installed for the first time immediately after a new hard drive formatting a few months ago).  Has anybody experienced something like this before?  Is this related to a change in one of those two EPs and I just don't notice it right away?  Does the jump bug mean anything other than "broken game, dude"?  Is there a way to find what's causing this other than one-at-a-time trial & error?  Any other suggestions or guidance.

My other idea was to make it out of a cheap radio or mp3 player, more like a motivational book on tape.

I decided that I finally want to create some mods on my own.  Unfortunately, the sum total of my knowledge on the subject is that when they're done, they go into the downloads folder.  I spent a few hours yesterday looking up tutorials, but found that most of them require that I already know my way around SimPE, or are so obsolete that they no longer apply.  Does anybody out there have or know where to find some useful tutorials?  My goal is to produce a motivational mirror allows sims to encourage themselves into different personalities (sort of like stuart smalley, but without the emotional meltdown, though that may be a funny feature too).

If that works it would solve-ish my problem.  I'm mostly interested in the game not having to load a bunch of useless character files in the first place, and all the great not-having-to-deal-with-them which would come with that.

Oh, my prejudice isn't restricted to just the professors... it's for all game-produced characters.  I've hated all game produced and default characters since I started playing the original Sims five years ago, and Sims 2 just made them that much more obnoxious and hard to get away from.  They do nothing but get in the way and complicate the game for me.  Since I know that the game requires a certain number of NPCs to run properly, I use antiredundancy to keep their numbers down to a bare minimum and simply ignore them as much as possible.  The problem I have here is that I don't know why the game has to produce a full two dozen of them.  I'd prefer just one, and I'm even willing to go along with up to four, but twenty-four of them means that my game will have more professors than all other townies, downtownies, NPCs, and strays combined.  Obnoxious.

If that's true, then is there a way to keep them confined to the university, or to keep them from showing up anywhere else in the game?

Oh yeah!  The antiredundancy hack is what brought me to this site in the first place.

My style of playing The Sims is to create a neighborhood, use deleteallcharacters to wipe it clean, and play with as few NPCs as the game will let me get away with.  Yesterday I finally sent some sims to the university for the first time, understanding that the game would probably generate some NPC to bother me.  Along with creating a cheerleader, a cow mascot, and a streaker (one of each... bothersome, but understandable), it also created about twenty professors who now keep showing up all over my community lots.  I don't mind having 2-4 professors, but I don't know the best way to get rid of the rest of them without causing a lot of problems.  I could just wipe them out by deleting their character files using Sims2Pack Clean Installer (which i've tried in the past with other unwanted npc's), but my sneaking suspicion is that simply deleting them that way will cause genetic problems in future characters, and will eventually lead to my neighborhood blowing up.  I'm also about to start a fresh new neighborhood, and am interested in preventing the same thing from happening in this one.  I already tried to generate a professor or two so the game wouldn't bother making any more when I sent someone to college, but couldn't find the option on anything I tried.  So I have two questions:

1) How do I get rid of all of the unwanted professors in my old neighborhood?
2) How do I control how many professors are created in my new neighborhood?

Sounds reasonable... thanks dudes!