crashing on startup
My sims 4 game keeps crashing, and I don't know what to do. I've removed all my mods. Repaired the game. I also deleted it completely, but it still keeps on crashing once it's on the "Sims 4" page w...
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@gotsalty If you haven't already—I'm not sure from your description exactly what you deleted—please try playing in a clean user folder. Move the entire Sims 4 folder out of Documents > Electronic Arts and onto your desktop, and when you launch the game, if it launches, a clean folder will spawn with no content. (Your saves and other content will be intact in the folder you moved but temporarily not read by the game.) Don't add anything to the new folder yet; just let me know whether you can get far enough to start a new save and play in live mode for a bit.
If that doesn't help, please run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/
I've done that already, I even uninstalled the game completely but it still crashes as soon as it starts running. and theres my dxdiag file.
@gotsalty Your dxdiag shows that Sims 4 is crashing with a breakpoint error, which has a few different causes. One is a corrupt or incompatible graphics driver, and yours is from early 2020, so the first step is to update it. Go here:
https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/laptops
Enter your laptop's serial number, choose your OS (just Windows 11 is fine) if prompted, and you'll land on the driver download page for your system. Rather than let HP look for updates (you can do that later if you want), click All Drivers, then Driver-Graphics, and look for the newest Intel graphics driver by release date. Download and install that, and restart your computer.
The other common cause of breakpoint errors is Sims 4 running out of memory. While your laptop has enough RAM to run the game, it's possible other services are using too much of it before you even try to play. So when you've restarted your computer, please wait five minutes without opening any apps at all, then open the Task Manager (but nothing else yet). Let me know how much memory is in use: it'll show as a percent value in the Memory header. If it's close to or over 50%, click the Startup icon, take a screenshot of the list of startup apps, and post it here.
Yeah, installing the new graphic driver didn't work. It changes from 62 to 73%. also it's saying I have like 106 background processes and I don't know what to do about that..
@gotsalty I would disable Edge, Teams, BlueStacks, SteelSeries GG, and Wondershare from starting with Windows. Personally, I'd disable the EA App too, which you can do inside the App itself, but that's not going to impact how Sims 4 runs since you'd have to open the App anyway. The point here is that with everything currently running, your computer is somewhat low on memory before you even open Sims 4.
One other useful step you can take to help with memory management is to increase the size of the page file, which is where your processor stores data that would normally be in RAM but doesn't fit and isn't immediately needed. Here's how (option three):
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/manage-virtual-memory-paging-file-in-windows-11.8618/#Three
Set the minimum to 16000 and the maximum to 20000, then restart your computer.
One thing to note is that this will use extra storage—the page file space is allocated from your C drive—and your current free storage is already on the low side. So it would be best to see what you can delete, for example .zips or installers in Downloads where you've already extracted or installed the relevant content. This isn't critical yet, just something to manage carefully.
You can see your free and total storage by opening a File Explorer window and clicking This PC in the left panel. Your C drive currently has 25 GB free, which is about the minimum you want to see long-term, and it'll drop as you increase the page file size.
If you get another crash after all this, please post a new dxdiag. Please also link the HP driver download page for your laptop. That page doesn't contain any information about you or your computer, just the overall model.
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