I am no stranger to Sims 3 crashes but today has really taken the cake and I'm ready to pitch my laptop out the window.
My game was lagging/crashing (no black screen, just quit suddenly to desktop) so I thought it might be because I installed my EPs out of order, so I spent a whole day just downloading, installing and updating each EP one by one (I have all the EPs and one stuff pack) in case the game was unstable for that reason. I also successfully installed Errortrap and Overwatch. Well, the game was running more smoothly when I finally booted it up this morning, with less general lag and rendering time, but after about an hour and half of play (before it was crashing every fifteen minutes), it suddenly went to a black screen. And it. keeps. doing that. Sometimes I can play for a half an hour. Sometimes only two minutes.
I run my game in windowed mode with all background programs shut down and also disconnecting my Internet. Like I said, I do have mods installed but I had the same problem today when I took out said mods, and in general the mods seem to make my game run faster/better. I also have a lot of store content, nothing from the exchange, but again I ran the game without any custom content and it still crashed. I clear my caches regularly.
I'm on a Macbook Pro with an Intel Core i5 (2.4GHz of processing speed), Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I have 29.88 GB available and a memory of 4 GB. My Graphics Card, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, is fully updated (as is all the software on the computer). I know that my computer is not the best but it's definitely competent to run the game as I had a pathetic little PC Netbook that could run it, not to mention the fact that I've been running the game for almost two years with long periods where the game works beautifully. For the most part, I let the game set the "appropriate" settings, which most of the time is quite high (there's only one little slider that I tease up a little bit past the recommended setting). If anyone tells me that the problem is my computer or my settings, I will personally pitch said computer at them.
I've exhausted all my usual fixes and am at the end of my rope. My only possible theory is that the computer is overheating, which seems possible because I'm currently without my usual lapdesk and was foolishly running it on a pillow and/or my lap. In addition, I get a full black screen even when running in windows mode, which suggests to me that the entire computer is like, no, I give up, and that if it was just the game messing up then only the windowed game would go black instead of the entire computer screen. However, it did conk out on a hard surface after a long cool-down period; in addition, I also cooled it down a little and then it crashed after only two minutes! I think I could do more to cool it down, like maybe I just need to walk away from the computer for a long while, but I'm still not completely sure that overheating is the problem.
So here are my questions:
1.) Does it sound like the problem is definitely overheating - or is there anything else I'm overlooking?
2.) Any suggestions to cool down a computer, especially in a kind of McGyver way? I'm looking for a temp fix while waiting to get cooling fan or something like that.
