Game crashing on laptop that used to run it smoothly

@ssama003  Access violations are common and not specific enough to be helpful in troubleshooting.  One potential cause is the game going over its RAM limit, but there are plenty of others.  The specific addresses cited in the error are irrelevant for our purposes; they might be helpful to a developer, but that's it.

Is the save you're playing new, or have you played it before?  I'm wondering how memory use works in a new save with (currently) only the base game, and how stable it is.  Please also let me know how you've limited fps.

Hi, thanks for your answer.

I am playing a new save. Since I'm trying to fix the game, every time I open it, I delete my previous test saves.

In a new save, with only the base game, the memory usage is around 1.6GB to 1.9GB (when saving, only increases a few MB). My problem with the base game is how unstable it is, it's constantly going from 60 to 10 fps.

I've limited fps with Nvidia Control Panel.

@ssama003  What happens if you don't limit fps in the Control Panel?  It's not good to play like this long-term, but a quick test won't hurt.  (This is a problem over the long term, provided your laptop can cool itself effectively, which it absolutely should be able to do.)  Let me know how framerates behave then, as well as whether you get a crash.

Please also run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

The game performs the same, with huge fps drops (10 - 290 fps) no crash. The only difference is the CPU, that almost reaches 90ºC, it's usually around 70ºC.

@ssama003  You can reimpose the fps limit now, so please do.  (The question was whether the game would drop down to ~10 fps, and it did.)  Your dxdiag shows that the Realtek audio driver is crashing, and while I don't know that this is happening in Sims 3, it could explain the issue.  Asus offers a slightly newer driver for your laptop here:

https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-strix/rog-strix-g15-series/helpdesk_download/

Click "Show all_ under Audio, and find the Realtek driver dated August 26, the one with version number 6.0.8981.1.  Install it and restart your computer, then try again to play.

If this doesn't help, mute the sound within Windows (click the sound icon in the lower-right corner of the screen), restart again, and try again to play.

If that doesn't help either, please look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor.  Hit Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart of errors and updates with a column for each day.  Today is on the right.

Look for any errors that happen while Sims 3 is running, specifically with the sound muted.  If you find one, double-click it to see more details, then copy that info and paste it into a reply here.  If you don't see a new error, check back in an hour or so—the Reliability Monitor doesn't always update right away.

So I updated the driver and muted the sound but nothing changed.

In the Reliability Monitor, most of the warnings listed are from Windows Update because I have internet turned off most of the time, and the only time where the Realtek service actually crashed was when Asus Update Helper had an "unsuccessful application reconfiguration".

Any other Realtek service errors (warnings, not critical events) are just failed attempts at updating because there is no internet.

However, one thing I forgot to mention was that I used to get error "0xc0000005 - the application was unable to start correctly" on my newer laptop before I did some random windows update.

At the time I thought it was fixed since it never showed up again, but since I can't run the game to this day I looked it up and this error seems to be related to outdated/corrupted drivers (as per usual, not the case here since I update frequently and do clean installs with DDU), faulty RAM and/or damaged system files (probably not the case because my new laptop couldn't run the game even when it had brand new hardware and windows install, I also use the sfc tool sometimes and everything is ok), or as I suspect, incompatible software.

Probably a software update that causes problems with 32-bit programs. But I'm not sure because a lot of the people with this issue also couldn't fix it. Even it the Microsoft forums a lot of people complain that they couldn't fix it with any of the suggestions that were given.

@ssama003  Error code 0xc0000005 is an access violation, too generic to be any particular help, at least in this context.  What it means is simply that the program tried to access memory at a location and/or in a manner not permitted by the system.  Access violations can be triggered by almost anything, which is why you found lists of possible causes that include faulty hardware and damaged system files, but that's not a diagnosis.

Again, I would like to see all of the information relating to any error in the Reliability Monitor that happens while you're trying to play Sims 3.  Use the old laptop, use the new laptop, it doesn't matter, but pick one and stick with it.

No errors happen while trying to play the game.

@ssama003  I'd like to see the results of some hardware monitoring.  Please download hwinfo (it's free) from here:

https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

You don't need to install anything; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you like.  If you do want the full installer, be sure to click the button for hwinfo itself, not for lansweeper.

Restart your computer, open hwinfo, choose Sensors Only, and click the button that's a sheet of paper with a + to start logging.  Save the log file to your desktop for easy access.  Wait five minutes, then open Sims 3 and play for at least 20 minutes.  Don't alt-tab out of the game or run any other programs, aside from the EA App of course, while you're testing.  When you're done, click the same button to stop the logging.

Please upload the log to the third-party filesharing site of your choice (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and link it for me.  Either leave it in .csv format or, if you're going to use OneDrive, create a .zip file, and don't open the log before uploading it, or else my log reader might not be able to interpret it.

Thank you so much for your help so far. Here's the log: https://drive.proton.me/urls/2YJYR3W11C#eSHnoeaJi26K