Computer freezing completely while playing
For the past two months The Sims 4 has been randomly freezing up. Not just the game, but my whole system so that I have to restart my machine. I've completely uninstalled/reinstalled the game and all...
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@HowEmbarraSim How often do you get BlueScreens? There are a couple in your dxdiag, but it only lists the last ten errors overall.
Please look for minidump files and upload any you find. Open a File Explorer window and write C:\Windows\Minidump in the address bar. For the last two or three files, right-click and select Copy, then right-click on your desktop and select Paste. You can zip them together from there, upload them to the free filesharing site of your choice, and link them here. If you don't see any minidumps, just let me know.
Your dxdiag is also missing some information, because it crashed while running. And most of the other errors are failed Windows updates. So it's a good idea to run a couple of basic checks on your Windows system files. Here's how:
- Hit Windows key-X
- Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
- Inside the window that appears, copy and paste “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” without quotes into the window, and enter
- The system will start validating soon. If it throws an error, please list it here
- After it reaches 100%, hit Windows key-X again
- Again, choose “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Command prompt (Administrator)”
- Inside the window, copy and paste “sfc /scannow” without quotes into the window, and enter
- Post the message you receive here
Restart your computer, and run any pending Windows updates: hit Windows key-i, select Update & Security, and click the button to check for updates. Then restart again and try to play Sims 4. If it doesn't work, please run another dxdiag.
Hello again!
I found the minidump file - there in one from August 3rd. I'm having trouble loading it to a file share service, or opening it at all (Permission Denied - though I'm the admin on the computer)
I ran the check on Windows System files and got this:
"Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32>"
I did check for updates, but my computer says I'm up to date.
@HowEmbarraSim Windows will deny permission when you try to access files stored within the Windows directory. It's to prevent people (or viruses) from accidentally deleting an essential system file. That's why you need to copy the minidump and paste it to your desktop before trying to upload it.
And please don't open it first, or at least don't save the changes if you do. The apps you have installed likely won't be able to make sense of most of the symbols, so if you save it while in Notepad or something, the data may be corrupted and unusable.
- @puzzlezaddict Here's the dump file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PAZKkSR194TAwIYx4vEahd8O3SFr7Ppg/view?usp=sharing
Thank you for your help!@HowEmbarraSim The dump file won't unzip for me for some reason, but I don't think it matters: it's much too small (59 bytes) to contain enough information to be useful. Let's try another way instead. You can tell Windows to create crash dumps, play until a freeze, then find the dump and upload it. Here's how:
- Hit the Windows key, type "command prompt" in the box, right-click on Command Prompt in the search results, and select Run as Administrator
- In the window, paste "reg add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\devenv.exe" /v DumpType /d 2 /t REG_DWORD" without the outside quotes into the box, and enter
- Launch Sims 4 and wait for it to freeze or crash
- After it crashes, wait for any crash dialogs to finish (or restart if you need to)
- Then hit Windows key-R and paste "%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps" without quotes into the box, and enter
- Upload the last .dmp file to pastebin and drop a link here, as before
- When you want to undo the auto crash log dumps, open Command Prompt as before, paste "reg delete "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps" /f" without the outside quotes, and enter
To be clear, this might not work with the kind of freeze you're seeing. But it's difficult to tell without more information. Regardless of whether you get a crash dump, please look again in C:\Windows\Minidump for any files created while you were playing. If you find one that's at least a few hundred KB (up to several MB), please upload it.
If this doesn't work either, hardware monitoring would be an entirely different approach. It won't catch software errors, but then again this might not be a software error.
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