Crashing to Desktop -- DEP is set up

[wednesday21]

Not really. MoonsAreBlue is still having crashing problems after the latest patch and we've tried basically everything to fix the issues, but her game and create-a-world will not stop crashing. There's really just so much you can tweak in this game to make it work as it is supposed to.

Serena Darrin, I think this might be connected to fps (frames per second), i.e. the game might be using up your video card to extreme measures (and, subsequently, in order to prevent the card from frying up, the system ends the game's process). Could you please check the fps your game is producing? You can do so by opening up the cheat console, typing "fps" and hitting enter. The number in the upper-right corner is the frames used per second. If the number is too high (over 30, or 25 at least), you should try using the fps limiter. Find it here.

[xFezIsAFreakx]

Well, it fixed it for Frey I think, and really if it was as bad as that then wouldn't everyone's games be crashing?

It could be the fps thing, try it for now. Patching up the pre-Gen games still wouldn't hurt. Also, I play my game on an fps of 98 on average (on low settings) and I have absolutely no problems.

[MoonsAreBlue]

Well, it fixed it for Frey I think, and really if it was as bad as that then wouldn't everyone's games be crashing?

It could be the fps thing, try it for now. Patching up the pre-Gen games still wouldn't hurt. Also, I play my game on an fps of 98 on average (on low settings) and I have absolutely no problems.

Whoa, 98? You need to up those graphics settings to try and lower your fps. High fps is not a good thing.

And yeah, I still have crashing. It's pretty ridiculous. Like Wednesday said, we tried everything.

[xFezIsAFreakx]

I'm too scared to try higher graphics. They're currently all on low except for my beloved high sim detail. I'll try and up draw distance and stuff, what would be the perfect fps I'm aiming for? 30? (I know this is hideously off-topic - sorry.)

[wednesday21]

I'm too scared to try higher graphics. They're currently all on low except for my beloved high sim detail. I'll try and up draw distance and stuff, what would be the perfect fps I'm aiming for? 30? (I know this is hideously off-topic - sorry.)

Look at it this way: the human eye can only see 60 fps anyway. It doesn't notice any more frames per second than that. In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to have super-high fps if you don't need it and if it harms your video card (well maybe in shooters etc. high fps would be useful, but not in Sims). The "perfect" number would be 30 or 35. Actually, anything under 50 is good as long as the game isn't choppy because of that.

If you haven't done so already, enable advanced rendering and maybe animation smoothing too. Doing that will probably reduce your fps to the desired number.

[xFezIsAFreakx]

Both are enabled, that's like, the first thing I did when I got my new laptop because I was so ecstatic that it could run so smoothly. I'm going to give increasing everything to medium a go.

[Serena Darrin]

Wow, lots of new posts.

In answer to the thoughts and questions, my Pre-Generations games are patched up, and I'm using an FPS limiter.

So beyond that, I'm not sure -what's causing it.  I haven't had a chance yet to go in and play with my settings, but I'll give that a go.

[Figwit]

Regarding your remark about Firefox, I read the other day that leaving tabs open can consume a lot of resources.  Maybe all you have to do is close down some tabs when you have finished with them.

[Serena Darrin]

Regarding your remark about Firefox, I read the other day that leaving tabs open can consume a lot of resources.  Maybe all you have to do is close down some tabs when you have finished with them.

I haven't had a chance to test that yet, but yeah, I'll see what that does.  Funny thing is, the one time I noticed it on the Task Manager, I only had one tab open.

Still, something to test.   I'll have to start keeping track of if I only crash when Firefox is open.


Edit: 

Taking some of the advice here, I chanced my Draw Distance from High to Medium. . . . and haven't crashed since. *cheers*

[Serena Darrin]

My apologies for the double post, but I wanted to flag the thread.

So it looks like I am still crashing, even after turning down my Draw Distance -- and testing reveals it doesn't seem to be impacted by Firefox running in the background, either.

This time, I'm crashing when the school bus shows up.

I'm going to turn off reflections, as suggested to me in another thread, and see if that helps.

[Frey]

Hi! Long time no see, moving to the other side of the Atlantic proved to be more time consuming than I expected.

Updating pre-Gen games helped a lot in my case, but I still would have some random crashings now and then. Then one day I was trying to get my laptop to run the Asian Dynasties EP for Age of Empires II (it seems that darn game has something against win 7)  and was getting an error about a registry entry being wrong and some weird DLL files missing. So I downloaded and ran CCleaner and found... yes... 850 registry errors. To my horrifying surprise I found out that almost a half of these registry errors were Sims-related.... probably from the million times I un- and re-installed The Sims trying to fix my crashings. I fixed the errors with CCleaner and I've had no crashes ever since. It could be coincidence or not... crashings are pretty random sometimes so maybe I've just been lucky, but if nothing else works I would definitely give it a try. Make sure to back up when the program asks you to though - just in case.

[Serena Darrin]

Huh, I'll give CC cleaner a try.

Dropping my graphics settings seems to have helped.  I'm not crashing nearly as much; but it's still happening occasionally. 

Thanks!

[Frey]

Here's the link, I forgot to write it here yesterday:

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner