Game crashes and other problems.

[Dark Trepie]

It seems a lot of people are having these lately...

This all started about a week ago when the Curious lot in Strangetown refused to load.  Everytime I tried to load it I would get the little pop up box saying "This application has encountered an error.  This application will now terminate."  This first happened when Vidcund was on a downtown lot on a date.  So I figured that the lot was messed up now and decided I would move them to a new lot later.

Then things started getting worse.  The game would crash on any lot now after a few minutes of play.  This slowly degraded to crashing during the game load screen.  Sometimes I'd get the little pop up box like above.  Sometimes the game would just quit and go back to the desktop.  Sometimes it would reboot my computer.  And sometimes it would freeze my computer up.  One of the times my computer rebooted it rebooted again twice when the desktop loaded. 

I tried running other games to see if I got the same results.  The only other PC games I have are Diablo 2, Starcraft, and Warcraft 3.  All of these ran fine.  When I tried playing The Sims 1 Complete collection though it crashed and froze my computer just like TS2 did.  And when I went and tested other applications I noticed iTunes was crashing, quiting, and freezing up my computer just like TS1 and TS2.

I talked about this in #grah and Dr.Beast suggested that it might be my power supply going bad.  A few other people I talked too suggested the same thing.  So I bought a new one today, a 450 Watt power supply.  (My old one was a 250 Watt).  But I'm still getting the same errors and lock ups.  And its the same three programs that are doing all of this.  TS1, TS2, and iTunes.

I'm wondering if this is some kind of video or sound card driver issue.  Or if there's something that these three apps have in common, like the use of a certain .dll file.  And if so could this .dll file be corrupt.

I don't know.  I'm hoping someone has a clue as to what is going on here.  Because at this point I'm ready to say "The hell with this" and reinstall Windoze.  I just have to find someplace to back up 70 gigs of crap first...   




Oh yeah,  I've tested my RAM.  And it checks out Okay.  So its not that.



ETA:  This is the latest error log from TS2 if anyone can make any sense out of this.

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[Dark Trepie]

Add Windows Media Player to the list of "Things that go Kaboom".   

[Hegelian]

I don't know.  I'm hoping someone has a clue as to what is going on here.  Because at this point I'm ready to say "The hell with this" and reinstall Windoze.

Sometimes that's what you gotta do.     But try the Repair utility first. Boot from the Windows CD, and when the Setup routine starts, choose Repair instead of Install. This will reinstall any missing or changed Windows system files. Of course, you will then need to the Microsoft Update site and repatch everything, but at least you won't need to reinstall any apps. You could also run the system file checker from the Command prompt:  sfc /scannow

I just have to find someplace to back up 70 gigs of crap first...

For years I've had tape drives in my PCs (not used often enough, but they've saved my butt on several occasions), but these days an external USB/FireWire hard drive is probably the option of choice for the home environment, on the basis of speed, capacity, and cost. 7200-RPM models from the major manufacturers run about US$100 for 100 GB and US$130~140 for 160 GB. Considering that a 100-MB drive would back up all three of the SCSI drives in my PC (without compression), that's probably all most folks would need provided they're not doing video editing or audio mastering. Regarding transfer rates, based on specifications USB 2.0 is a bit faster than IEEE 1394 (FireWire).

[wyrdwing]

Sorry to revive this thread ^_^;
I get this problem a lot too...
At first my pc would restart but after I got some more Ram it seemed to have cleared that restarting problem up.
But i'm curious as to if it's my graphics card or a program conflict since I used to have conflicts before with sims1 and it turned out to be an art program and dvd player. 

[fwiffo]

If by "tested my RAM" you mean anything other than pulling out your DIMMs and trying it with modules known to be good, then you haven't tested your RAM.

Here's what I'd check for in the order I'd check them:
1) Stop overclocking if you're doing that
2) Update your video drivers
3) Update your sound drivers
4) Borrow some RAM to try
5) Borrow a video card to see if yours is flaking out
6) Same with sound card (if you're not using on-board sound)
7) Try underclocking your CPU
8 ) Find some way to test for the remaining really annoying possibilities - flaky motherboard or processor.