I got my laptop in May of this year and I was really excited to play the sims 3. Whenever I try to play the game the only thing that pops up is a black screen with a white line across it. I’ve tried everything and I’ve given up, please help.
Casper15PR Sims 3 would be installed into Program Files\EA Games. That's not the folder where you'd find Options.ini. If the game is launching but crashing, you will definitely have a second Sims 3 folder in Documents > Electronic Arts, almost certainly with Options.ini inside because it's one of the first files generated. So please look there.
Please also describe what happens when you try to play. There are several varieties of "won't launch" that can be conflated but that have widely different causes.
Finally, please look for relevant 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 an error that happened at exactly the time of your most recent attempt to open 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.
Sorry for the later reply, it's essentially what the OP here has where I launch the game from the launcher and my screen goes black and then the error notif pops up and I get the white line. I used to have the screen thing happen on my laptop but it would still run afterwards.
As for the reliability monitor, funnily enough did not register the service initialization error, but did record the successful app reconfig of Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable from each time I tried to launch it, I will launch it and wait to see if it'll pick the error up.
In regards to the Electronic Arts folder, I found it via the search bar, because when i entered the actual folder, I couldn't find it, I dont' see an options ini, but something i noticed is that all the files seem to be older except one which has yesterday's date.
Also would like to mention and I don't know if it has anything to do with it, but I had to stop the One Drive backup a while back because it was moving and making apps unusable, since according to some apps, they should never be run from one drive or something like that and I'm not savvy enough right now to know if there's someway to exclude certain programs to not mess them up.
Lastly I'll attach an image of the sims 3 folder from the Electronic Arts folder to see if I'm missing something and have a great day!
Casper15PR That's the right Sims 3 folder, and it does have Options.ini in it. Windows isn't displaying file extensions (which you can fix if you want), but Options is the same file.
OneDrive is also syncing the contents of this folder, as shown by the cloud and arrow icons. Plus, you still have a Mods folder inside, which could easily be the reason the game isn't working.
Since you wanted to stop OneDrive backups but haven't, please see this guide to getting rid of OneDrive entirely, the proper way:
[Read First] Running Sims 3 in Windows | EA Forums - 8323446
Once you've done that, try again to play, without your Mods folder, and see what happens.
puzzlezaddict Thank you so much!! I don't know if the one drive thing or removing the mods folder (though it was empty) the game finally launched and I can now enjoy playing this game again. Apologies for the late reply, but thank you for your patience. Have a great day!
