Hi, has anyone had an issue with the sims 3 freezing and restarting your computer a few minutes after loading up? If so, how did you fix it? We have a brand new Nitro V 15 gaming laptop, it runs all other games fine except the sims. Have tried al of the usual things like updates, uninstalling and reinstalling, clearing cache etcPlease help 😊
daisyhuff No program should cause a computer to restart, so that's concerning. Is this with the laptop plugged in or only running on battery, and does the other way work better? You probably wouldn't get much play time on battery life, but I'm still curious whether you'd get a restart.
Please also 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.
puzzlezaddict Hi, thank you for replying! I have attached the dzdiag here. I haven't tried to run the game without the charger plugged in, we were told not to do this when we purchased the laptop. Is this something I should try?
daisyhuff Running even a mildly-demanding game on battery isn't going to go well, in that the battery won't last long and performance will drop for the (short) duration. But it's a useful test, so yes, please do try it once, if what's below doesn't help.
Your dxdiag lists a pile of alternating system errors: one crash of the graphics driver, then one specific type of error that could apply to any driver and is causing a BSOD. Since the second error could be related to a graphics driver as well, it would be best to do a clean uninstall and reinstall of both drivers. Here's how:
Use the drivers Acer provides for your laptop, the "VGA Driver" from AMD and the RTX 3050 driver (although all the offered Nvidia downloads are the same, so this doesn't matter):
https://www.acer.com/us-en/support/product-support/Nitro_ANV15-41
The proper order of operations is uninstall the Nvidia driver > uninstall the AMD driver > restart > reinstall the AMD driver > restart > reinstall the Nvidia driver > restart, all while your computer is offline.
If you get another crash afterwards, whether or not your laptop restarts, please look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor. Click 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 errors that happened at exactly the time of your most recent crash, but only those that happened after reinstalling the drivers. 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.
Hi, I have done this and just launched the game. It appears to have deleted all of my saved games and completely reset the game itself. There was also a warning message saying the hardware is not recognised. Is it possible to retrieve my previous game?
daisyhuff The missing saves and other user data has nothing to do with reinstalling the graphics drivers. But it's possible you have another issue, this time with OneDrive—it could upload your data to cloud storage and leave it there, or it could have been activated and changed the designated Documents directory, which Sims 3 uses as well. Point is, check your settings, as described here:
[Read First] Running Sims 3 in Windows | EA Forums - 8323446
While you're looking at that guide, please read the part of the first post that covers limiting in-game framerates. This is a necessary step, although not doing so shouldn't cause a computer restart.
If you can't find your saves with the OneDrive guide, you can search your computer for your save name, or for DeviceConfig, a file that will exist in any Sims 3 user folder that's been active at least once when the game launched.
Hi, we don't have OneDrive. I uninstalled it when we first got the laptop as I heard it is prone to issues. I have found the backup of the game in files and tried to follow the steps to recover it by moving it to a different folder and changing names but that doesn't seem to be working.
daisyhuff Then to cover a few possibilities at once, please create a new admin Windows account and try playing there. Make it local, as in, don't connect it to a Microsoft account or any email address. (You can keep declining until you're offered some security questions instead.) Don't import any of your preexisting data to the new account, whether saves or settings or anything else.
Please let me know about in-game framerates and whether the game runs different on battery.
