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MarcelBunny00's avatar
MarcelBunny00
Rising Newcomer
2 months ago

My screen turns black after the newest update for The sims 3

When I turn on the game and there is an intro, the melody plays but the screen is black. The problem started occurring after the latest update to The Sims 3. I have already tried to repair both the EA application and the game itself in the application. I cleared cache files, reinstalled the game, added my graphics card to the game files, updated graphics card drivers. Does anyone else have this problem and if not, do they know how to fix it?

3 Replies

  • MarcelBunny00  Please provide a dxdiag.  Click Windows key-R, enter dxdiag in the run box, wait for the scan to finish, click "Save all information," and save the file to your desktop.  From there, you can attach it to a reply using the paper clip (Attachment) icon included with the other formatting buttons.

    Please also post a screenshot of the message you get when you try to play, the one that appears over the launcher and is titled Zanim zagrasz w The Sims 3.  I can't tell what else it says, but if you post a screenshot, I can plug it into a translater.  Use Windows key-shift-S to capture that part of the screen.

  • MarcelBunny00  You can ignore the message in the second screenshot and just click "don't show this message again."  This was added with patch 1.69, to tell users they could disable some packs if they wanted, but it's not necessary to do so on a computer that can handle all expansions together.  And yours is on the border of what I would expect to handle all EPs without crashing.  If you do need to disable some packs, start with Pets, or Seasons if you absolutely need to play with Pets.

    For the issue itself, your dxdiag shows that the driver for your graphics chip is crashing.  Each crash is paired with another, less-specific driver error, and this could account for the game not working.  So please do a clean uninstall and reinstall of the graphics driver, as described here:

    https://crinrict.com/blog/2019/02/clean-re-install-of-graphics-drivers-with-display-driver-uninstaller-ddu.html

    Use the newest driver HP provides for your laptop.  Go here:

    https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/laptops

    Enter your laptop's serial number, choose your OS (just Windows 11 is fine) if asked, and you'll land on the driver download page.  Click All Drivers, then Driver-Graphics, and download the newest Intel driver.  The first number matters most, in that 32 is newer than 31; after that, the last four digits matter.  Install this driver yourself, while the computer is still offline.

    You'll notice that the driver download page gives you the option to let HP check for newer drivers.  This is fine to use in general, but for the graphics driver, you need to manually remove your current version and install the newest one; letting the website take care of it is not good enough for this type of problem.

    If this doesn't help, 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 an error that happened at exactly the time of your most recent attempt to play Sims 3.  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.

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