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mariadigner's avatar
mariadigner
Rising Novice
1 month ago
Solved

Crashes even with ALL troubleshooting done

Hi everyone! I’m experiencing persistent silent crashes in The Sims 4 on PC and and I’m trying to understand if others are experiencing the same issue.  My system is fully updated and relatively new...
cc or mods removed
crashing
graphics
hardware
updates
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    25 days ago

    mariadigner​  That's quite a lot of crashes and definitely suggests a broader system issue.  Sims 4 should never cause any of these except the first one, and then not an error with ntdll.dll, which is such a fundamental part of Windows that if it were completely corrupt, your computer probably wouldn't turn on.  It's much more likely that something is calling ntdll.dll incorrectly, but still, that shouldn't happen either.

    A BIOS update is a great next step since an issue at that level can cause all kinds of weird system issues.  If that alone doesn't help, I would run a repair install of Windows (this doesn't delete your data, don't worry), and then Driver Verifier would be the step after that.  Here's how to run a repair install:

    https://www.elevenforum.com/t/repair-install-windows-11-with-an-in-place-upgrade.418/

    If you get to step 14 and are NOT asked to keep personal files and apps, back out and start over.

    You can find info about Driver Verifier and a download link here:

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/driver-verifier

    Choose the option to "automatically select all drivers," and let it do its thing.

    The idea here is to give you as clean a setup as you can get short of wiping the system.  I don't know that you'll need all these steps; this is just the progression of troubleshooting, from the motherboard software to the OS to critical drivers.

    I would skip the suggestion to increase the RAM allocation to the iGPU though.  The iGPU already has the ability to borrow more memory as necessary, up to 16 GB according to your dxdiag.  The allocation is just what's reserved, as in, the rest of the system can't use it at all.  With 32 GB physical memory overall, there shouldn't be any real competition for resources.

    I would be happy to take a look at your crash dumps, but I'd rather you at least update the BIOS and run a repair install, then provide new files.  If this were a question of one error, it might be a lot simpler to fix, but given the variety, I would probably end up suggesting all of the above even with the crash dump info.

puzzlezaddict's avatar
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
1 month ago

mariadigner​  Thanks for the dxdiag, but it's full of BlueScreens, to the point where that's the only error listed.  This is the BSOD type if you're curious:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-0xf7--driver-overran-stack-buffer

Would you like to address this first?  Despite the text of the article, this isn't necessarily about malware; the point is that malware can look like this, so any driver behaving badly in precisely this way is suspect, according to Windows.

To find out which driver is the culprit, you'd need to find more info, probably by analyzing a crash dump.  I can do that for you, if you'd like.  Open C:\Windows\Minidump, copy the most recent three files to the desktop, zip them together, upload the .zip to a third-party filesharing site, and either link it here or send me the link via PM.

For the Sims 4 issue, I'd need to know what kind of crash you're getting.  Let the game crash again, then 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 an error that happened at exactly the time of your most recent Sims 4 crash.  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.

mariadigner's avatar
mariadigner
Rising Novice
30 days ago

Thank you for taking the time to dig into this and actually help, I really appreciate it.

Quick update: last night I rolled back the GPU driver to version 25.10.2, and since then I haven’t had any Blue Screens at all. That said, The Sims 4 is still crashing.

I’ve attached my Reliability Monitor, which shows the most recent Sims crash.

Also the most recent minidump files = https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x6jSa1qytRN9PUq9qGVJXZ8nny1EVRT6/view?usp=sharing          — these are from before the driver version change, but I figured they might still be worth looking at.

I’m also attaching the LastCrash.txt file and a new dxdiag, just in case they help.

Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like me to check or test.

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