Fix my choppy game

[speedreader]

I lost my hard drive in August, replaced it and started again with Sims.  Before the crash my game ran really well, considering how old my 'puter is.  Now it is choppy and lags terribly.  The big difference (other than the new HD) is that I have D/L custom eyes.  All of my Sims have them.  (34 Sims)

Question #1:  Do you think it could be my CC eyes that is slowing me down so much?

Question #2:  If I move my D/L'd eyes file to the desktop to find out if the game runs better without that specifically, what will happen to all my Sims?  I assume they will revert back to Maxis eyes, but then when I put the CC eyes back into the game, will my Sims get them back? 

Question #3:  Anyone have suggestions for settings I may have missed, both within and outside the game, to make it run better.  I have tried being able to view less of the neighborhood and there is very little difference between nothing beyond the lot I am playing and the next setting up, so I play seeing the first level beyond the lot.

Specs for my computer:  emachines T4480, 2.4 ghz, 160 Gig HD, 8 mb cache, 512 1 G DDR Ram - are you ready for this - ATI Radeon 9000 video card with 64 mb DDR.  I have updated the drivers for my vid card but have not purchased a new one (yet).  Mostly because I kept finding ways to make my game run okay without buying a new card.  If that will fix this I am not opposed.  (But then I will have to spend hours reading the upgrading your computer thread to figure out what card to buy, sigh.)

Thanks for any help you can give me.

(edited: forgot I upgraded my ram last year)

[OpiumGirl]

1...I don't really think so unless they are corrupt somehow..eyes are very small files and your system is definitely on the higher end of performance, so it should make no difference at all. I have a ton of eyes in my downloads, and those are the least of my worries measured against some of the high poly game objects I have


2. As long as you don't change their appearance and/or save before you exit after testing, the eyes will stay the same
 

3. You could try changing where your virtual memory is stored if you happen to have another harddrive or partition on your system, as long as it is as fast or faster than your main HD...That helped my game out a lot.
Possibly, you could try updating your graphics card driver to a more recent one, but be aware that sometimes this makes things worse if the new driver is in beta form or unstable.

[moonluck]

It is probably not the eyes, but do you have a lot more custom content now? That can really slow down your game.

[speedreader]

I don't think I have any more CC than I had before the 'crash.'  Mostly I just went and got the same stuff I had.  I ran everything through the clean installer which would hopefully catch anything bad. 

I don't have any partitions or multiple hard drives.  When I check my virtual memory it is fine, so I really don't get why my game does this. 

Thanks for your thoughts.  Anybody else?

I just thought of something.  I used to run McAfee Antivirus and I never shut it down to play the game.  I am now running Adelphia's Freedom antivirus (comes free with the broadband connection).  I'm not shutting it down to play.  Could that be my problem?  If so, help.  I'm not sure how all of this works.  I am always connected, so how do I safely shut down my virus scanner without shutting off my router, since I want the rest of the network to continue having access to the internet?  Did that question even make sense?

Thanks again.

[idtaminger]

I also had an old computer that crashed. Pre-crash, it ran rather well for regular tasks, and even ran Sims sufficiently well. Got it fixed, and now the thing can't open anything without major lag (even windows explorer), and I'm occasionally getting "blue screens of death", as they call it, which I NEVER used to get.

I don't see why performance took such a drastic hit after it was fixed, but it did, and I don't really know why. Then it suffered some anomaly with the internet settings, rendering it incapable of connecting to the internet wirelessly, so right now it's basically sitting there useless, which is a shame b/c it actually has some pretty decent specs - 2.5 Ghz, 512 Ram, ATI Rad 9200. No idea what's up.

[KatEnigma]

1) After you reinstalled everything, did you defrag? Installing Windows and all your programs really fragments a machine. (And I'm not a defrag obsessive either, I can't remember the last time I defragged, but I always do it after installing Windows)

2) Did you somehow end up with a hard drive that's slower than what you had? Most standard ones are 7200 RPM these days, but I've still seen 5400 ones for sale in stores.

3) Did you update your drivers after reinstallation?

4) The biggest thing you can turn off, in-game, is reflections. After that, turn off shadows.  You can also try entering in the cheat "vysync off" It can give you about an extra 5-10 FPS.

5) The problem might be your AV, but I somehow doubt that anything could be more of a resource hog than McAfee, other than Norton.      If you want to test it out safely, just disconnect your ethernet cable from your computer or disable your wireless connection (depending on if you're wired or not) before disabling the AV. No need to shut down the whole network, just disconnect your computer from it.

[speedreader]

Yep, I defrag'd, scanned disk, usual maintenance stuff, after I installed my software onto the new drive.  Speed is 7200, which is faster than the old drive, BTW.  I did update my drivers using emachines Help and Support Center.  I assume that will find them all and I don't have to search them out myself.  I did, however, go to ATI and find the latest update usable for MY card. 

Thanks for the tips about what to shut off in game to ease the lag.  Later today I will try disconnecting from the Internet and playing my game.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Thanks everyone for all your ideas.

[Goldenbow]

Hey speed. Don't know if you nailed the problem or not. But in regard to question three, I also had really choppy game performance which I solved by disabling the games shaders (among other things they give the swimming pools that rippling water effect). Open the userStartup.cheat file and type in "boolProp useshaders false." I forgot where I picked up this tip, but it's the only thing that has worked in my case (I've a Gateway GT5028 w/an Athlon dual core processor 1 GB of RAM and a GeForce 6600 game card). My game performance has been great since.