SC4 and SP2 Greetings... First post.. Per Josh's useage rules lemme say this first. SimCity 4 original 2 cds Windows XP-SP2 original.. (just so we got that good) I previously had SC4 installed on this machine... Win XP pro (no SP) ran fine.. machine good.. I then nuked my machine to start new after a cheerful little virus attack.. Bought a new copy of XP w/SP2 (old XP cd was chipped) but now I cant seem to get SC4 to run. I even tried the NoCD thing... didnt help... (not a fan of those anyway) I install, it goes through both cds but then at the end (100%) it puts the shortcut on my desktop, then the installation program disapears as if it were finished. (but no closing text) I try to start SC4, the hourglass/pointer comes up.. the cd spins up... then the hourglass and then.... nothing.. I have torn the net apart about this, installed the update, reinstalled the sound driver, updated DirectX, reinstalled my board drivers, even played around with MS Firewall... is anyone else in this situation... I looked through the forum here but I couldnt find this same problem.. Thanks
I have to say, I've avoided both XP service packs precisely because I've heard of problems like this. That being said, you can't avoid them forever. If a NoCD really doesn't help, that practically rules out the optical drive completely, which is good. That leaves some sort of a conflict with windows, of which updating drivers is good, and should have solved the problem if that was it. Which leaves Software conflicts, a corrupt install of either XP or SC4, or Hardware glitches from faulty boards. The conflicts are easy to address, by just turning off everything in msconfig except necessary services, and completely disabling the firewall/virus protection. The SC4 install errors aren't much harder to address by reinstalling Windows install, or hardware issues are harder though and the order of which to check them is up to you I'm afraid. Hopefully it isn't either, as both really suck, and implies the virus actually managed to damage something.
Have you tried installing the game from disc images? Copy the two discs to the hard drive and run autorun.exe from there Here's EA Support's how to
