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AllyGal123's avatar
AllyGal123
4 years ago

Extremely Slow Loading Times (and a long explanation)

Hey all. So, my gaming laptop became absolutely unusable about a year ago, which meant I had to transfer all my favorite games (The Sims included) over to my dinky little Surface Pro 6. It's a great tablet/laptop, runs very quickly, but it doesn't have nearly enough storage or memory. In any case, I've been able to play The Sims 3 and 4 with minimal errors for the past year, any issues were things I've dealt with since first playing the franchise.

Soon, though, I noticed that the storage on my Surface was getting used up by The Sims (especially TS3). So, I hooked up an external hard drive, moved it over, and all seemed well for a while. Until last night, when while saving I got a pop up message called "Error 12." I've never received this error in my 11 years of playing The Sims, so obviously I was confused. After looking up what it meant (insufficient RAM) I tried my best to resolve it -- deleted the ".bad" folder from my Saves, made the backup folder the main save. When I had transferred my games over to the external hard drive, I was unable to move the Documents folder that holds all of the data of TS3. Last night, I decided to use this thread for help when moving the "The Sims 3" folder, using Windows' command prompter.

As far as I could tell, everything was working just fine. The game started up, and it was slower than usual. Nothing that worried me, though. Once it got to the little "Into the Future" loading screen right before you see the main menu, though, THAT'S when I became worried. It took much longer than it usually does to load, I thought it was going to get stuck. It didn't, thankfully, and I got to the menu screen after about 5 minutes. When I selected a household to play, it loaded as normal, but completely stopped when it got to around 95%. I was sitting there for 15 minutes waiting for this thing to load, hoping that maybe it was just super slow like the other screens. Eventually I got tired of waiting and just shut down my computer and went to bed.

I'd really like some help here, because at this point, I'm at a complete loss. I've tried everything from changing the game's location, resetting my Surface, repairing the game through Origin, to even removing certain mods/CC. I'm tempted to move the game files back to the local disk rather than the hard drive, but I'm worried I'll get that Error 12 message again when the game eats up all my RAM. As soon as I stop playing it, the memory is fine, so I don't know what the issue is. Any help would be much appreciated.

TL;DR - I transferred my game files to an external hard drive and I'm afraid that screwed over the entire game, because loading is infinite.
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    4 years ago
    Loading a game like Sims 3 from an external drive will almost always be slower than loading it from an internal drive. The connection to the external is unlikely to be as fast as the internal one, but perhaps more importantly, your Surface has a (very fast) solid state drive, whereas your external is likely a mechanical drive (HDD) and will run much more slowly.

    This is not always a problem for the game files—you might be able to have the game itself installed on the external and only see small increases in loading times. But when your save itself is loading from an external, the effect can be much more pronounced, especially if the save is large in terms of absolute size.

    Having said that, it's possible that this save is corrupted and can't load properly. Error 12 is an out of resources condition, usually but not always referring to memory, and saves running close to the game's ~3.7 GB RAM limit can become corrupted even without throwing an error, although they're usually fine. So while loading the save from the external drive complicates things, it may or may not be the underlying issue here.

    If you want to test, try starting a new save with your current setup. If it doesn't work, then the issue is likely that your user folder is on the external, or perhaps something about the way you set things up. If it does work, and loading times are good enough for you, then you can leave the files where they are and troubleshoot the save itself.

    By the way, I'd never store my game or my user files on an HDD, just because of the load times. And I'm not sure you need to keep your saves on the external anyway. Error 12 doesn't have anything to do with storage, so unless you wanted to offload data for other reasons, moving the user folder was unnecessary. If you do want to free up some storage on your internal drive, you can always transfer your backup saves and other data like screenshots.
  • AllyGal123's avatar
    AllyGal123
    4 years ago
    "puzzlezaddict;c-17894787" wrote:
    If you want to test, try starting a new save with your current setup. If it doesn't work, then the issue is likely that your user folder is on the external, or perhaps something about the way you set things up. If it does work, and loading times are good enough for you, then you can leave the files where they are and troubleshoot the save itself.

    By the way, I'd never store my game or my user files on an HDD, just because of the load times. And I'm not sure you need to keep your saves on the external anyway. Error 12 doesn't have anything to do with storage, so unless you wanted to offload data for other reasons, moving the user folder was unnecessary. If you do want to free up some storage on your internal drive, you can always transfer your backup saves and other data like screenshots.


    I actually retried to play the save that gave me the error right after making my previous post, and it ended up loading through. I'm not sure if my Surface just needed to rest overnight or whatever, but I'm glad at least I can still play. It is quite slow, though. And considering your explanation, I guess it makes sense.

    The whole reason I transferred my game over to the external hard drive was indeed to free up storage. I still don't regret that decision, because TS3 and other games I had on here were taking up a LOT of space. I'm pretty sure it was like, 13GB for both TS3 and TS4. Which is crazy when you only have 118GB. Anyway, I'd totally be okay with transferring it all back to the internal drive, however I know it's just going to go back to taking up a lot of storage. I can't have that, especially since the main thing I use the Surface for is schoolwork and art.

    The strangest part about all of this is that the original save that gave me the error hadn't even gotten past the first sim week. I have saves where it's generations deep, and like I said before this has never happened to me. Perhaps it was just the icing on the cake for my RAM? Or is it more likely that it actually got corrupted? If so, how can I prevent that in the future?

    Thanks so much for your speedy input!! :)

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