Is there a fix for the blue screen of death?

[FourCats]

I have all the expansion packs, and all the stuff packs.  I have removed securom from my system and am using the no-cd crack to load the game.

I have tried several different drivers.  It still crashes.  One driver I had stopped the crashing till I got bon voyage.

The game will crash to a blue screen, and sometime stay like that till I ctrl+alt+del. Or some times it crashes shows the blue screen and goes to the desktop.  It has no warning and is totally random; it could crash after a few min of play, or I could play all night and have no crash.  Sometimes I get an error message about my graphics adapter, but now always.  I have to restart the computer to load the game again.


runs sims good. (except for the bsod) Hubby built it for 1/3 to 1/5 the cost of a gaming machine and it keeps up with them pretty well.

My specs:
Shuttle XPC barebones system came with onboard sound, power supply (which we had to upgrade), heat sink

CPU: Pent 3.2 ghz dual core processor -- not a celeron
Memory: 2 sticks of 512 dual channel each = 1 gb memory 4 channels
Vid card: Nvidia Gforce 6600gt; PCI express with 128 vid memory
Dvd RW drive
Hard drives: 150gb 10,000 rpm for programs -- 1/4 full (loads windows in less than a min, used to load sims in less than a min till I filled it with downloads now it takes 3-5 min) 300 gb 74,000 rpm hard drive for storage divided into 4 nearly equal partitions.
Operating system: Windows XP service pack 2

not sure if I'm forgetting anything.

And the game runs fast even when I had a 12 family household. I sometimes have to pause to keep up. All graphics settings are high by default. I see cut scenes. I can invite 8 sims to a party.

good hubby, good hubby. I think I'll keep him


 Oh and we  bought a 19" LCD response time: 8ms monitor from ebay for about $200. Sims looks good on it.

If this has already been answered, please don't poke me with sticks, as I haven't found a solution yet  Nevermind.  Use all the sticks you want if you solve my problem.   

I have a firewall and virus scanner that I keep updated.  ( don't really want to disable those as I have an always on dsl connection and often use the internet while playing)  I run defrag, norton one button check up, virus scanner, and several ad ware/spyware scanners on a regular basis (2-5 times a week -- defrag every couple of weeks, we try not to let it be longer than a month)

[SnootCB]

Yes, the nVidia BSoD is back again with BV.  No, there is not a fix for it yet.  There are new nVidia drivers, but so far they haven't done much for me or others I've talked to with this same issue.  The only thing you can do is use the boolprop useshaders false cheat to keep crashing to a minimum, though you won't be able to see fish or rainbows or anything else that uses shaders.  There is a thread about his in the Oops! You broke it! board.

[FourCats]

Thanks for the help; I don't like that cheat as it ruins my awesome graphics, but I guess that's better than the game randomly crashing (sometimes right after a promotion) and me loosing everything because I forget to save.

I guess I'll go over there to the "you broke it thread" and read what's there.

[MutantBunny]

"Is there a fix for the blue screen of death?" Yes: never own a computer.

You don't list what driver you're using. I would try the 163.75 at guru3d.com, if you haven't yet. I too was having the ramdom crashing until I found the driver stash at guru. Guru = good. Try it.

And yes! Simmies belong on a high res LCD screen. I went from a hi res CRT to an Asus LCD--the difference was incredible!

[FourCats]

Thanks.  I've tried 3 different nvidia drivers.  I'll try that one now

[doren]

The old NVIDIA driver 7.7.7.2 (build June 2005) works for me and many other people. No more blue screens or endless loading and it shows all the graphical effects that some other people report as missing. It is an old driver but it is doing its job just fine.

It does not work with 7xxx NVIDEA cards but you got a 6600 GT (like me), so you could try this (if you find it, I don't know whether it is still available).

[ZephyrZodiac]

My game crashed a couple of times recently.  No blue screen, just straight to the desktop and generating a sims2exception both times.  I haven't really figured out why, the amount of RAM being used couldn't have been anywhere near the max (I have 2gigs) as last time it was the first lot I played after opening the game - small lot, one sim just back from Uni.  Happened when she was having a date with her boyfriend and somehow it seemed to get stuck at the dream date stage and when I clicked on End the Date it just crashed.  The only other thing is, I think both times the crash happened the object I clicked on was at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, probably just where the Avast! icon is lurking underneath.....

[virgali]

"Is there a fix for the blue screen of death?" Yes: never own a computer.

You don't list what driver you're using. I would try the 163.75 at guru3d.com, if you haven't yet. I too was having the ramdom crashing until I found the driver stash at guru. Guru = good. Try it.

And yes! Simmies belong on a high res LCD screen. I went from a hi res CRT to an Asus LCD--the difference was incredible!

So, does the guru3rd.co work?