I Got a New Video Card and Now My Game Won't Load

[geekily]

I wasn't too thrilled with the speed my game's been running at - I can't even get my really large lots to load.  I upgraded from 512 mb to a gig of RAM earlier in the week thinking that would help, but no such luck.  Last night, my boyfriend switched out my ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 7200 for an NVIDIDA GeForce3 Ti 200 that he had sitting around his house.  My screen looks beautiful now, but the game won't load.  You can click on the Sims icon all you want, but nothing will ever come up.  Do I need to reinstall my games because of my new hardware, or is there an easier way to make it work? And if I do need to reinstall, do I need to reinstall just the EP or the base game, too?  (I just have UNI, if it makes a difference.  I had NL, but after several rounds with EA support I was told the reason it wasn't working is because they upped the requirements with NL and my comp didn't meet them. :/ But now I'm just rambling.) Thank you so much for your help! I really appreciate it!

[J. M. Pescado]

The sims to be the "Old Car Effect" I've been experiencing. Basically, the game doesn't wanna load sometimes for some reason, and you gotta bang away on the icon, sometimes multiple times, to make it run, rather like an old car.

[Sagana]

percussive maintenance

[buddha pest]

This has always happened to me.

I seem to have better luck clicking on the icon in the start menu rather than the desktop icon, but not always.

It helps too to wait awhile between 'bangs' on the icon.

[Aldebaran]

Try to bring up the taskmanager (ctrl-alt-del), and see if there's already a running sims2 process. It's usually two process, one is the exe, in your case thesims2ep1.exe, the other is ~e.5something. If you see them, nuke them, then try to start the game again. Sometimes it can get stuck in the memory without loading, and prevents further attempts at starting the game until a reboot happens. The video card change really shouldn't have killed the game (nor any other hardware upgrade).

[yetyak]

If nothing shows in task manager, try deleting the groups.cache file.  Sometimes that works wonders.  (in the My Documents/EA Games/ Sims2 folder)

[jrd]

New videocard? Delete userProps.xml in the config folder. Sometimes TS2 isn't smart enough to flush it itself.

[Regina]

My experience has been that the game doesn't pick up new hardware and/or new drivers on its own.  When I upgraded either one I had to re-install.  You should be okay with simply re-installing Uni, not the whole thing.