Sims 3 plays about 5 mins then crashes to desktop Hey there. I see a lot of ppl have had this problem, but here's mine: Got Sims3 in Sept., got 1st patch, it played fine. got the 2 most recent patches and now it crashes to desktop after about 5 mins. I have updated my drivers and manually uninstalled then reinstalled. Have tried most everything on EA's website. Spent 2 hours on live chat with a rep earlier, problem SO not resolved. Here's my dxdiag. PLEASE HELP!!!! I'm having withdrawals! LOL
When it crashes to your desktop do you receive any error messages? If it does copy it down and let us know what it is . You might be experiencing an overheat problem as well. Download a program called RealTemp and have it monitor your graphics card's temperature while you play the game. Let us know what that is so we can determine if it's getting too hot for the card. One good sign it's overheating is you will getting artifacts all over the monitor (blocks of corrupted looking graphics) and then it just black screens out. You might check and make sure that all of your fans and vents on your computer are free and clear of any obstructions and there a re no dust bunnies taking refuge in there. Ideally you want at the least an inch of free space all the way around your pc so that it can draw in fresh air. Do you have this problem with any other games?
No error messages or artifacts, it just clicks over to the desktop like Sims was never open. I just cleaned the vents & such a few days ago. I will try the RealTemp program and post the temp. The only other game that crashes right now is Sims 2. Evil Dead: Regeneration and the Spore demo still work fine, as does SimCity 4 and SimCity Societies. All my older games still work fine also, at least the ones my daughter has been playing lately. I appreciate your help.
Is the game patched ? Like I said I can't see any reason why it would do it unless the card is starting to crap out on you. How long's it been since you updated your video driver? Do you play offline or while you're online? Are you running any other programs in the background while you game or anything. I think your specs are fine although your cpu is a bit weak according to the specs required as it calls for at least a 2.0 GHZ cpu.
I've done the auto updates, if that's what you mean by patched... I just updated the driver today trying to fix this. I play offline, and I made sure everything was closed. Like I said, it's only been since the latest updates, and I don't understand it either. I know my CPU is a little slow, but it had been playing just fine, even if it did take forever to load. LOL
that's odd . there's a program called pc wizard 2008 (free) that will monitor temps too. It may not be as good as real temp but it should do the job. You might try defragging the hard drive too and maybe run CCleaner to clean out any garbage files cluttering up your hard drive that could slow things down.
