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Decay_Country's avatar
Decay_Country
3 years ago
Solved

Frequent crashes

Hi. I'm having a problem with crashes, with and without mods. I've tried every method I've seen to fix it, but no luck. I have a high-end laptop and never had these issues in the past. It usually crashes a few minutes after booting up the game. Attached is my dxdiag.

pc
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    3 years ago

    @Decay_Country  I apologize for the late reply.  I wanted to get a second opinion on your hwinfo log because I wasn't completely sure what I was seeing.

    The log shows that your CPU cores are thermal throttling, off and on, in the last few seconds before the game crashes.  However, the cores and other CPU temperature measurements don't get anywhere near high enough to justify the throttling on their own.  This by itself isn't unusual—some laptop manufacturers set the system to throttle early to avoid extremely high temperatures.

    The thing is, this doesn't usually cause a game or other demanding software to crash, at least not right away.  Otherwise no one would be able to play games on any gaming laptops set up this way.  So if I had to guess, I'd say this probably wasn't the cause, or at least not the only cause, of the crashes.

    Hwinfo also picked up a few other thermal throttling-related measurements, also related to the processor and also only at the end of the log.  These happen in the absence of alarmingly high temperatures as well, but I don't know enough about the laptop's setup to say whether, for example, a Thermal Event reading would cause the system to crash the game or itself.

    What I can say is that while CPU and GPU temperatures never get dangerously high, they are somewhat high and rising quickly while you play.  So the laptop might benefit from a good cleaning, or even a cooling fan to use while you play.

    If that doesn't help, I'd take it into a shop to have someone examine it in person.  The hands-on diagnostic tests are more thorough and more accurate, and there's no substitute for someone actually looking at the laptop.  If you call around, you may find a repair shop that charges nothing or only a small fee for diagnostics, so you wouldn't need to pay a large amount upfront.

8 Replies

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    3 years ago

    @Decay_Country  Your dxdiag lists a number of errors relating to Windows processes and nothing about Sims 4.  That could mean that the game is crashing for other (non-Windows-caused) reasons or that the Windows errors have crowded out the others.  Anyway, before doing anything else, please run a couple of basic checks on your Windows system files:

    • Hit Windows key-X
    • Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Windows Terminal (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
    • Inside the window that appears, copy and paste “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” without quotes, 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 “Windows Terminal (Administrator)”
    • Inside the window, copy and paste “sfc /scannow” without quotes, and enter
    • Post the message you receive here

    Restart your computer, hit Windows key-i, select Update & Security, and click the box to check for updates.  If any install, restart again afterwards.

    The next step, even if you've tried it already, is playing in a clean user folder.  (The idea is to try it again after running DISM and sfc.)  Move or rename the Sims 4 folder in Documents > Electronic Arts, which will allow the game to spawn a new copy.  Don't add anything to it yet; just start a new save and let me know whether it crashes.

    If you do get another crash, please look for a related crash dump.  Click Windows key-R and copy and paste this:

    %LocalAppData%\CrashDumps

    When you enter, you'll see a list of .dmp files.  If one of them is from Sims 4 or the EA App, please upload it to a third-party filehosting site (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and link it here.  If you see a crash dump that was written at exactly the time the game crashed, I'd like that too.  But in either case, please only upload files from after running DISM and sfc.

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    3 years ago

    @Decay_Country  Did you really see nothing at all from DISM and sfc?  The former should either say that the operation completed successfully or that it did not; the latter should say it found nothing, it found corrupt files and repaired them, or it found corrupt files and was unable to repair some of them.  If you didn't see any message at all, then neither scan finished.

    Did this new crash produce a crash dump?  I'll have a look at the older ones in a bit, but it's actually really important to know whether Windows recorded an error related to the crash.  It's the difference between two very different categories of problem.

    Please also look for a related error in the Reliability Monitor.  Hit 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 crash, the one you edited your post to tell me about.  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.

  • Decay_Country's avatar
    Decay_Country
    3 years ago

    @puzzlezaddict 

    Sorry, what I meant was it provided no relevant info besides the fact that they were complete. No clues to the problem. The new save game also did not produce a crash dump.

    Reliability Monitor says: "Problem: Windows was not properly shut down. Description: The previous system shutdown at 9:08:25 PM on ‎6/‎22/‎2023 was unexpected."

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    3 years ago

    @Decay_Country  Okay, this is starting to sound more like a hardware or heat issue, so the next step is doing some hardware monitoring.  Please download hwinfo (it's free) from here:

    https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

    You don't need to install anything; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you like.  If you do want the full installer, be sure to click the button for hwinfo itself, not for the other optional download.

    Restart your computer, open hwinfo, choose Sensors Only, and click the button that's a sheet of paper with a + to start logging.  Save the log file to your desktop for easy access.  Wait five minutes, then open Sims until it crashes.  Don't alt-tab out of the game or run any other programs, aside from the EA App of course, while you're testing.  When you're done, click the same button to stop the logging.  If your entire computer crashes, the log should still be intact up to that point.

    Please upload the log to the third-party filesharing site of your choice (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and link it for me.  Either leave it in .csv format or, if you're going to use OneDrive, create a .zip file, and don't open the log before uploading it, or else my log reader might not be able to interpret it.

  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    Hero+
    3 years ago

    @Decay_Country  I apologize for the late reply.  I wanted to get a second opinion on your hwinfo log because I wasn't completely sure what I was seeing.

    The log shows that your CPU cores are thermal throttling, off and on, in the last few seconds before the game crashes.  However, the cores and other CPU temperature measurements don't get anywhere near high enough to justify the throttling on their own.  This by itself isn't unusual—some laptop manufacturers set the system to throttle early to avoid extremely high temperatures.

    The thing is, this doesn't usually cause a game or other demanding software to crash, at least not right away.  Otherwise no one would be able to play games on any gaming laptops set up this way.  So if I had to guess, I'd say this probably wasn't the cause, or at least not the only cause, of the crashes.

    Hwinfo also picked up a few other thermal throttling-related measurements, also related to the processor and also only at the end of the log.  These happen in the absence of alarmingly high temperatures as well, but I don't know enough about the laptop's setup to say whether, for example, a Thermal Event reading would cause the system to crash the game or itself.

    What I can say is that while CPU and GPU temperatures never get dangerously high, they are somewhat high and rising quickly while you play.  So the laptop might benefit from a good cleaning, or even a cooling fan to use while you play.

    If that doesn't help, I'd take it into a shop to have someone examine it in person.  The hands-on diagnostic tests are more thorough and more accurate, and there's no substitute for someone actually looking at the laptop.  If you call around, you may find a repair shop that charges nothing or only a small fee for diagnostics, so you wouldn't need to pay a large amount upfront.

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