Forum Discussion

HowEmbarraSim's avatar
HowEmbarraSim
New Rookie
5 years ago

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...
pc
HowEmbarraSim's avatar
HowEmbarraSim
New Rookie
5 years ago

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.

puzzlezaddict's avatar
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
5 years ago

@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's avatar
      puzzlezaddict
      Hero+
      5 years ago

      @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.

About The Sims 4 Technical Issues - PC

PC players get help with their technical issues in The Sims 4 here.52,428 PostsLatest Activity: 25 minutes ago