Graphics issues??

[Jorenne]

OK, my computer is acting all freaky on me and I'm not entirely sure why. Now I know a bit about computers, but this one has me stumped.

I have TS2, University and Nightlife, and was enjoying playing it, until tonight, when it fails to load correctly. Or rather it loads the game, but then when I load a neighbourhood I get a message saying my display drivers have failed and I have to reboot the entire machine (this has so far happened three times) And twice had to repair my installation of windows XP sp2 to even get the thing to boot up.

Now this would seem to be a simple issue apart from the fact that I haven't updated my drivers or anything else since the game was running fine. I have tried updated drivers, but the ones I had were the most recent, and I've even tried rolling back up to five driver versions as I once had a similar problem with TS1 and this fixed it then.

The only changes in my PC in the last six months since I bought it have been a new sound card, which although is still in the machine is disabled in the hardware profile as I have been lazy about finding the right drivers, and a multi card reader in place of one or maybe two of my usb slots.

Current specs are:

P4 3.0gzh CPU
512mg RAM
NVidia GeForce FX 5700LE 128meg graphics card
Driver Version 7.1.8.9
Windows XP sp2 (updated regularly)

Any other info I've forgotten, just give me a shout and I'll find it out for you.

[dizzy]

You probably need to update your video drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

[Jorenne]

Thanks for replying, but I have already tried updated drivers, and backdated drivers, like I already said I did in my first post

[ZiggyDoodle]

Have you run ScanDisk or a similar utility and defragged your drive? 

[Vesca]

Maybe you have a virus - they can do lots of strange things to your computer.  When's the last time you ran a virus scan?  I run them once a week just to be safe. 

[witch]

I bought it have been a new sound card, which although is still in the machine is disabled in the hardware profile as I have been lazy about finding the right drivers, and a multi card reader in place of one or maybe two of my usb slots.

Try enabling your sound card and installing the correct drivers. The sims uses sound a lot. Maybe when it says display drivers it is just giving wrong error mssg? Remove things from USB slots. Sometimes if I leave a memory stick in the slot, my sims game does a hard crash to a reboot. (Twice).

[nectere]

sounds like a slot failure, if you have another card you can try swapping it out and see if that makes a difference, if it doesnt then you could have a agp slot failure
also
check to make sure your card is fully plugged in, in my experience, sometimes they can pop out a bit which would also cause a slot failure, usually cause by me moving stuff around etc. (or just generally trying to break stuff as usual)

do you use xp?