stivhatten The one error in your dxdiag could be nothing meaningful at all, or it could be something, but the nature of the error doesn't make that clear on its own. So there's no reason to worry based on that info alone, and currently no other concerning info of that nature. The fact that the screen goes black while you're playing is probably more significant.
I doubt that setting the fps limit to 30 would cause the black screen, but the important question is whether it happens again. And you can set a limit of 60 or 59 or whatever works for you.
In the past few days I played continuously for hours and still nothing happened. The only instances where the screen gone black has been when, while playing Sims 3, I paused the game and pressed the windows key to return to desktop without closing it (keeping it in background in order to return later). After a while (5/10 minutes) of doing practically nothing on Windows (not even opening a file), the screen became black as already described. I had to manually turn the laptop off.
After turning the laptop on again I checked the Reliability Monitor, but the only error reported that day is the improper shutdown of Windows when I turned the laptop off. Nothing more. I checked also the Performance Monitor (perfmon /rel) as you suggested, but I do not know where to look at, can't find any error chart.
About temporary files, I remember that a while ago I activated the voice "Delete temporary files" on the tweaks of Winutil I performed on this laptop (before installing Sims 3) . Does this contribute to the actual unavailability of some temporary/error reports?
