EA/Maxis has found the Nvidia problem!

[FourCats]

For those who get either the random DOS "blue screen of death" crash, the "nv4_disp" infinite loop message, or unexplainable crashes to an in-game blue screen lockup with skipping audio, this is for you.

This latest news on the "nVidia crash" has a short version and a long version.

The short version: Make sure your anti-virus program(s) are disabled/turned off before playing The Sims 2. Especially those who have any Norton product installed. Games and Anti-Virus programs both like using a large amount of your system's paged memory. Even if your game did not crash you would probably see a reduction in your performance. For some reason when The Sims 2 is running with Norton Internet Security, the Anti-Virus is not releasing some of the memory which eventually leads to the system running out of memory.

The long version: Those of you who have been following this story will know that after weeks of research and testing, we could not reproduce this crash internally, even using some of the exact same models of video cards that were being reported as failing by our customers.

After consulting with a customer who had experienced the crash with a brand new system purchased from Dell, we bought ourselves the exact same system from Dell and immediately saw the crash for the first time.

We named this PC "Crashy".

As the error messages from the crash indicated the crash was occurring in the nVidia driver, we sent Crashy to nVidia for them to research the problem. After researching the problem for several months, nVidia concluded that the fault lay with our game, that the game was "leaking kernel memory" and that memory leak would eventually cause the PC to crash. How long the crash took to occur would be different for each individual gamer, as it is dependent on the specs of their PC. More RAM or more video card memory would delay the crash, or perhaps prevent it entirely.

When we got Crashy back from nVidia recently, we reformatted the PC's hard drive to start fresh in an attempt to isolate where and how kernel memory would be leaking from the game when we had not detected such a leak in any pre-release game testing.

Once we installed The Sims 2 and all the EP's back onto Crashy after the reformat, once playing the game, the crashing stopped occurring entirely!

This was very discouraging, as we can not fix a crash that we can not reproduce, and now it seemed we were back to Square One.

But upon further review, we realized that Crashy had come from Dell pre-installed with Norton AntiVirus, and when we first tried Crashy we had not been following our own Customer Support instructions about shutting off the AntiVirus before playing the game. The re-format had uninstalled the Norton from the machine, so now it was not running at all while playing.

Looking into Norton a bit on the Internet and with consultations with both nVidia and Microsoft, we learned that Norton has been suspected of leaking kernel memory while running, and this in combination with a program like The Sims 2 that utilizes kernel memory could be a fatal combination for a PC.

While we do not want to throw the Norton product under the bus, we have not been able to reproduce the crash since removing it. The Norton product is commonly bundled for free and pre-installed with off-the-rack PC's that many of our players purchase, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this could be the cause of this crash for these players.

So for those of you who are experiencing a crash, we ask that you turn off/disable/shut down your anti-virus program, Norton or otherwise, before starting the game. Report back to us what happens in the Technical Help Forum with an easily identifiable subject to your post so we will see it. Thank you, and we hope this works for you!

~MaxoidShannon

Yeah, right.  Like I'm going to do that.  My virus scanner and firewall are all-in-one.  So I disable that to play my game, and let you come into my computer through my always on internet connection?  I don't think so.

[Tigerlilley]

They're always said disable your antivirus/firewall.

Theres a simple solution Fourcats.  Don't Sim and Net.

Otherwise get rid of crappy Norton.

[FourCats]

norton isn't our firewall and anti virus.  humm.  don't sim and net, that would require a lot of self-control.

[Lyra]

I want to say that people running Norton have it coming to them anyway. There's no excuse to have that bloater on your system when there are so many free and effective firewalls/anti-virus programs.

But yeah. Saying that you should turn off your anti-virus before playing is a little bit cheeky. More than a little bit. Why not just fix that memory leak of yours?

[Aggie]

Fourcats, if that fixes the crashing problem, I don't think people are going to complain. Simply disable your Anti-Virus and your connection to the internet.

[Tigerlilley]

norton isn't our firewall and anti virus.  humm.  don't sim and net, that would require a lot of self-control.

Ok wait what.  Do you even have the Nvidia crashes? If not... why are you complaining about turning Norton off?

Its been said since the basegame came out that Norton and Sims won't play nice together.  Hell Norton doesn't play nice with anything.

[FourCats]

I get the freezes/crashes.  But if I "useshaders off" then I dont

Edit:
My virus scanner & firewall is Zone Alarm. We like it pretty well.

Edit 2:

My spyware program just found, Grokster  listed as a P2P, what is that?

[Tigerlilley]

I want to say that people running Norton have it coming to them anyway. There's no excuse to have that bloater on your system when there are so many free and effective firewalls/anti-virus programs.

But yeah. Saying that you should turn off your anti-virus before playing is a little bit cheeky. More than a little bit. Why not just fix that memory leak of yours?

I read that as they "suspected" it was the games fault, but really, its Nortons!
Which may or may not be truth, but that's what I think they're saying.

[Madame Mim]

How the fuck can it be Nortons when Iwouldn't let that piece of shit anywhere near my PC and I get the crashes.

Which is not to say I shan't check this out. I shall disconnect my internet connection from the wall. Turn on the shaders and turn off my Virus protection. But I won't hold my breath.

I'll get back to you on whether this makes any damned difference at all.

[KellyQ]

I read this yesterday and thought what total bullshit.

I always disconnect from the internet, disable my virus and spyware protection and I haven't had fucking NortonHogResources Anti-Virus in years.

They are so full of shit. The BV EP is the fucking problem and as per usual, they are passing the buck off to another software manufacturer and gee, once again, their customers.

Business as usual for EA.

[ZiggyDoodle]

I want to say that people running Norton have it coming to them anyway. There's no excuse to have that bloater on your system when there are so many free and effective firewalls/anti-virus programs.

Huh?  I've run Norton's a.v. program since my first desktop way back when (using version 2005 right now) and have never had any game issues (or virus). Just their a.v. and utilities, which I rather like.  My firewall is ZA.   No Nvidia card though; I run an ATI X850XT which does a dandy job.

[Quinctia]

Norton seems to take up way too many resources for something that should be running in the background.  Also, depending on what options you have, it can lock up so many things on the computer and make them inaccessible to the user.  We have Norton on the computers at work, and it drives me nuts, but what can I do?

I've run (essentially) without an AV for years, and I haven't had a virus either.  Products like Norton are mainly a) to make the end user feel real secure and b) to keep the really stupid from installing stupid crap on their computer.

The real nasty stuff circumvents AV stuff, anyway.

[Madame Mim]

Seems I don't need to confirm it, but I will. I disconnected, turned off my virus protection and I damned well could have held my breath (almost). Barely two Sim hours in and my video card crashed so hard I had to do a forced reboot.

[Zazazu]

Wait. You're saying EA was wrong? Blasphemy!


  Surprise, surprise. 

[Carrigon]

I've had this crash with Castaway.  I do not have Norton and I turn off my antivirus when I play.  I still get the same crash.  I barely run any processes unless absolutely necessary.  I don't think that's quite where the problem is coming from. 

There could be a few other things doing this.  Paging file too small, video or soundcard acceleration too high, some codec or other file conflict.  I've already had crashes in FreeTime because of Divx's software.  If a sim turns on the tv, Divx loads up and bang, looping audio and a crash out.  I really haven't had the time to do anything about this yet, so I just get rid of the tv's on the lots for now.

[Simsample]

I had this issue over a year ago with my old NVidia, I think it was when NL or Pets came out. The way I solved it was to put more RAM in the computer, and that was a PC which was purely for gaming- no internet connection, no AV, no background services or screensavers or nice windows themes. The PC was well above minimum specs at the time, too.

[IcemanSimmer]

EAxis is so full of shit it ain't even funny 

My first reaction when I saw MaxoidShannon's posting earlier in the week was "jeez, these guys are really clutching at straws". Here's my take on the whole situation from a post I made here at MATY last October:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,8993.msg277139.html#msg277139

To quote myself:

"The logical conclusion is that the EAxis development team screwed up some of the DirectX code in BV. How can the game, which was working fine in Seasons + 162.18, suddenly get broken with the release of BV just 2 months later???"

I use Norton AV and have it on at all times even while gaming and it has never caused any issues. The bottom line is that the Sims 2 game code is fubar (Nvidia has told Eaxis that also). On a side note, ATI card owners are now experiencing gfx issues coming out of FT (not as severe as us Nvidia owners, but problems nonetheless).

The only way this issue will be resolved is if EAxis stands up and admits their game is borked instead of passing the buck to someone else (first they blamed Nvidia, now Symantec). I've resigned myself to the fact that a fix for this long running problem will probably never happen. The only saving grace is "boolprop useShaders false" (which is in my UserStartup.cheat file). This stops the BSOD for me at the cost of degraded gfx quality.

I've had this crash with Castaway.  I do not have Norton and I turn off my antivirus when I play.  I still get the same crash.  I barely run any processes unless absolutely necessary.  I don't think that's quite where the problem is coming from.

My daughter was experiencing severe BSOD's on her Castaway. From the readme file:

PROBLEM: Game crashes soon after starting.
Some recent NVIDIA drivers have problems when running when Hyperthreading is enabled on your processor. Try updating your driver first. If this doesn't help, turning off Hyperthreading in your BIOS will workaround this issue. If you have no idea what Hyperthreading or BIOS is, it's probably not worth messing around with this stuff. Contact your video card manufacturer for assistance.

Since her comp uses Core 2 Duo, I told her to use Task Manager and set the affinty of the game to 1 single core instead of using both. This solved the issue and Castaway is running quite stable for her. If you are using a multi-core cpu, give this a shot, may help.

[Count Four]

I do not have boucoup amounts of RAM. I have NVidia. And most pathetically, I am a dial up user. Because of that, I never try to play this game while online.

When I had the base game, and even when I had an EP or two, I left security programs running. Blue Screen of Death, like clockwork. Once I installed Seasons, I knew that wasn't going to work at all on my crappy machine. Now I shut down Avast AV, ZoneAlarm, and just about everything else, up to and including Explorer.exe.  I haven't seen blue screen of death in ages, because I basically give Sims free run of my RAM.

So I agree with EA, it's a memory issue. Whether it originates with anti-virus or Sims 2 itself is up to the tech-type people to figure out, but I know when Sims 2 is running alone, I get no BSoD.

(And it says in the game booklets to shut down anti-virus and crash guard programs before running Sims. I just looked.)

[quasim]

I'm running TS2 with all EP installed on a notebook wich is 5 years old (Dell Inspiron 8200, 64MB ATI, 1GB RAM, 1600x1200 TFT). Before FT I rarely had a crash, but now with FT I started using Moniques "Save Reminder" to alert me every 24 Sim Hours to save.

To get TS2 running smoothly on this machine, I used a special WinXP Gaming edition, which comes with no bulk at all. Since that PC is not on the net with that configuration, no AV etc installed. Of course I'm dual booting with a "Real XP".

These crashes are IMHO sloppy coding, and any connection to specific hardware is purely coincidental.

[jsalemi]

My daughter was experiencing severe BSOD's on her Castaway. From the readme file:

PROBLEM: Game crashes soon after starting.
Some recent NVIDIA drivers have problems when running when Hyperthreading is enabled on your processor. Try updating your driver first. If this doesn't help, turning off Hyperthreading in your BIOS will workaround this issue. If you have no idea what Hyperthreading or BIOS is, it's probably not worth messing around with this stuff. Contact your video card manufacturer for assistance.

Since her comp uses Core 2 Duo, I told her to use Task Manager and set the affinty of the game to 1 single core instead of using both. This solved the issue and Castaway is running quite stable for her. If you are using a multi-core cpu, give this a shot, may help.

That readme note has been around forever in the regular game, too -- at least as far back as OFB. And yea, it is relatively useless these days, when all but the cheapest entry-level systems have at least a low-end Core 2 Duo in them. You can't really turn off one core.    There have been many discussions about poor Sims performance on dual and quad core processors here for over a year, including a recent one in the 'you broke it!' forum about game lag.

The Task Manager method works, but unfortunately TM gets amnesia, and doesn't remember the setting from one play session to the next, so you have to load the sims game, then go out to the TM every time to set the affinity. There's an easier way to force the game to use only one processor all the time-- use a handy little free utility called ForceCore (attached here).  It's pretty simple to use -- just put it someplace the system can find it (I have it in c:\windows\system32), and then put 'forcecore.exe <x>' in front of the rest of the target info in the icon that launches the sims game (right-click, then choose properties on the icon).  The <x> is replaced by the core number (1 or 2 on a duo), or you can use a -1 and it'll pick either one at runtime. 

And yea, the whole Norton thing is bullshit -- their 'solution' only really applies if you're running the game with their minimum specs (in which case, you have more problems than just nVidia issues). On a dual or quad machine with at least 2gb RAM, the anti-virus software would barely make a blip in the amount of processing power and memory it uses, even with bloatware like Norton or McAfee. Better yet, of course, is to dump Norton/McAfee, and go with a good freeware antivirus (I use avast! and never had a problem with it).

[MistyBlue]

It's probably a combination of the factors; system specs, nVidia, and Norton. I have 6 computers in my house, only one of them has nVidia and only that one crashes. I chuck it up to the card and the lack of RAM in the machine. Turning off Norton doesn't help, but that is probably because the RAM is so low, it wouldn't run the game either way. And...don't think just because your machine is relatively new (a couple of years old) that it'll run the game fine. That computer is a Media Center PC, purchased in 2006. It's newer and it doesn't play the sims. nVidia causes graphics issues and crashes the game.

[KellyQ]

My daughter has 1 gb RAM, a 6150 Nvidia card, AVG anti-virus, never disconnects from the internet or shuts down background processes and yet BV runs fine for her w/out any crashes.

I have recently added a second gb of RAM (for a total of 2), a 7600 GT Pro Nvidia card, AVG anti-virus, always disconnect from the internet and disable all background tasks and yet BV would consistently give me a black screen or crash.

I have never been able to play a game that I shelled out my hard earned money for, with a better system than my daughter's and yet EA wants to tell me it's my computer or a program that I don't even use. Riiiiiight.

[KatEnigma]

Anyone who's ever left the game paused for a long time, say for overnight  , knows that the game has a memory leak. I can certainly believe that running Norton or McAfee makes that apparent much faster than if you aren't running it. That's not to say that people who aren't running them aren't running other programs- or that since this is an endemic Nvidia problem, that Nvidia itself is sucking up more resources than it needs. (Who knew that Catalyst, in all its suckitude, was better than whatever program Nvidia sticks you with?) It's a heck of a lot easier to "solve" this problem by telling people to turn off everything than to actually fix a memory leak that's been in the game since at least NL.

Also, BSOD crashes can be caused by all kinds of things. Maybe someone is crashing because of the memory leak, while someone else is crashing because of an underpowered PSU- I know someone who got a new Dell, and had random crashes playing WoW immediately, took it back, got a new one, and THAT PSU asploded on her. Do not trust Dell (or HP, or anyone other than yourself) to have built a computer with a PSU that can actually run your video card under full load. Another person could be crashing because of overheating. But because they all have Nvidia cards, they say "oh, the Nvidia/TS2 problem" and don't investigate it any further.

I'm running Nod32, which was designed to not suck up my resources. I've run with AVG and Avira, but got sick of the "Buy Me" crap you get from free programs that have pay alternatives. Nod32 is lighter, anyway, even if it's not free. And unlike McAfee, if I do ever disable it, it STAYS off, instead of trying to "help" me by turning itself back on. 

[Kazzandra]

Though really, it's no surprise that Norton Nazi causes things to crash. Hex, you can't even uninstall the thing without performing top-secret surgical procedures on your computer's software environment. And they now charge $50.00 a year for service, just so they can take up half a gig of RAM and ask you to authorize the computer to communicate with itself.
Yes, I am a former Norton user. I stopped using Norton Nazi when I updated my subscription last year and because of the daylight savings time change it told me that my subscription expired in 1900 (Y2K in 2007) , and I had basically wasted my money unless I wanted to uninstall and reinstall Norton, which required tinkering in the registry, etc. No, once I uninstalled Norton, I uninstalled Norton. And I haven't looked back since.

Oh, and I experienced the overnight game crashes quite frequently. I have 2 gigs RAM, an AMD Athlon 3200, and a Radeon 9600 on my computer, all hand picked by me for performance and afford ability. But when that was going on, I also had Norton Nazi. So, Maxis can point the finger at them and be justified, but I'm sure that's not all that's going on. Because now my game crashes if I leave it on for a more extended amount of time and it crashes eventually after days.

Bottom line: Symantec eats system resources for breakfast, but so does the Sims 2. BOTH should fix their problems!

[CrabOfDoom]

My spyware program just found, Grokster  listed as a P2P, what is that?

Grokster is a peer-to-peer file sharer, like LimeWire or... um, LimeWire's actually all I use, so I can't think of the others. Anyway, that's what Grokster is, and if I'm remembering it right, it requires you to download something called the GAIN network with it in order to function. It leads to a lot of spyware. So much, that it once choked my old tower to the point that it wouldn't even start. I haven't used Grokster in years.