Fresh install, Uni NL only. Game crashes in Create a Student.

[cenoura]

It makes sense that my first post should be an "oops I broke it" post, doesn't it?

I have a fresh install with base game, uni and nightlife, with the nightlife patch. I restarted the computer after each installation, like the good little windows user I am  . No hacks or custom content at all. The game is crashing in the "create a student" screen after about 30 seconds of making a Sim. Checked in other neighbourhoods and in "create a family" - it seems to be only "create a student" causing the problem. After 30 seconds of creating a Sim student, one of two things happen. Either the computer restarts or one of those horrid Windows errors with the red cross pops up saying "This game will now close". Real helpful, huh?

Computer specs:

40 Gb harddrive space on my WinXP partition
1 Gb RAM
nVidia GeForce 6200 graphics card (which has 256 Mb RAM associated with it) with latest drivers (including DX 9.0)

Never played the Sims on this computer before. My old computer, which had much lower specs than this (intel on-board graphics, lower RAM), didn't have this problem. I know that there is a problem with nVidia drivers at the moment, but I thought that was only to do with the latest EPs? 

Any thoughts?

[Theo]

I had some problems with graphics drivers even with the Nightlife expansion - if that's of any comfort to you - so the first thing I'd try would be to install an earlier version of the nVidia drivers, and see if that stops the crashing.

Oh, and welcome to MATY 

[cenoura]

Update: Went into Pleasantview for the first time... the game crashed with a "this application will now terminate" error when the in game camera was doing that "sweep the neighbourhood" thing. So I'm guessing this is a graphics problem. Which sounds like rubbish to me - my old not recomended on-board graphics never let the game crash. Saying that though, the graphics seem a lot cleaner and shiny now. *off to find older drivers, as suggested*

[cenoura]

Any idea how old a driver I need? I've tried the latest (v93.xx Nov 06) and one that had a different build number (v84.xx Mar 06). Do I really need to go back to autumn 05 when the EP was released? 'cos I'm sure that'll screw with other games I have installed under Windows. The game seems to just crash at random when a new thing occurs eg change the "wall up - wall down" settings. If it was just crashing in CAS I could live with that.

*sigh* This is my fiance's old computer which he custom built. He didn't optimise it for gaming... so that could be my problem. I mean, he did change because it became old and unstable. I just thought "hey, it actually has a supported graphics card, it'll play the Sims like a dream" Enough with my rambling anyway. Thanks for the help, and I'll try an older driver tomorrow.

[SaraMK]

I have the same video card and use the 77.77 drivers.