Game causes PC/applications to hang

ArctycFcx  Have you tried a clean boot yet, or playing offline?  Offline is straightforward: sign into the EA App, put it in offline mode, disconnect your computer from the internet.  I'd try that first since it's so much simpler, and if it helps, that narrows things down significantly.

The clean boot would disable other services you might not know to look for.  Here's how to do it:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

The one service to leave enabled is the EABackgroundService, which the EA App needs in order to run.  Disable the rest as described.

When you reboot your computer, go through the Task Manager's background processes list shutting down any service that doesn't absolutely need to be running, for example anything from MSI Afterburner to RGB software might still be enabled.  If you accidentally kill a critical process and it doesn't restart on its own, just reboot your computer again.

Don't open anything other than Sims 4 and the EA App while testing, not even a browser window.

If this helps, you can selectively reenable services until you find the culprit, then either leave that disabled or (if it belongs to an app you want to keep using) let me know what it is so we can try to fix the underlying issue.

If it doesn't help, I'd try the clean boot with your computer offline, just to be thorough.

If that doesn't help either, please provide a dxdiag.  Click Windows key-R, enter dxdiag in the run box, wait for the scan to finish, click "Save all information," and save the file to your desktop.  From there, you can attach it to a reply using the paper clip (Attachment) icon included with the other formatting buttons.

Hi, I haven't tried clean boot or offline mode yet.

What I have just tried is perfmon. According to that report, I apparently have excessively high disk queue length to my SSD on C:\ when the game is running. It seems that the game is just completely overwhelming my C:\. The game is on another drive (my M.2) and C:\ has a lot of free space. I don't understand why the game would be needing to utilize so much of C:\ during play, especially since I have moved my pagefile over to the M.2, but even that shouldn't make a difference, because I have 32 gigs of RAM, and my RAM usage during play is minimal.

I also saw this while playing by keeping my task manager open on the performance tab. When the game and everything else is running normally, I see 100% Disk 0 (C:) usage. I also see 98% usage on 3D CPU despite low overall CPU usage, and similarly high GPU usage.

You can see above my hardware exceeds the requirements, and I had this same GPU (GTX 1060 6GB) when I last played sims 4 maybe a year or two ago with no issues. I also don't see these issues with any other game -- notable MSFS24, which is a much more needy piece of software, runs more or less fine on my computer, at least as well as can be expected with my amount of VRAM.

I'll get back to you on the clean boot and offline mode. dxdiag attached.

You may notice in this dxdiag a possible memory leak detected from the game as well, though I don't think that's the major issue. It really seems to be the disk usage, as that makes sense as to why all other applications hang.

+++ WER8 +++:
Fault bucket 1420043841176008322, type 5
Event Name: RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: TS4_x64.exe

Part 2:

Welllllllll I did the clean boot, and went offline, and much to my surprise... it seems to have worked. (Edit from the narrator: It did not. See below)

I ran the game for 10 minutes with no issues, so I went back online, started up discord and browser, and ran the game again for maybe 20 minutes, no issues.

CPU usage is overall 33% with 3D at 70%.
GPU usage 70%
**Disk usage is generally 0% across all drives.

I'm not sure which of these processes it was conflicting with, but the only running non-MS processes that I stopped for the clean boot were:

NVIDIA LocalSystem Container
NVIDIA Display Container LS
Razer Game Manager
Razer Synapse Service
Razer Central Service (I did close the application for these 3 to test before, not sure if it ended these processes though)
Steam Client Service

There were also some processes from Brave, Epic, EasyAntiCheat, Rockstar, and Overwolf, but those were already "Stopped" before I disabled them, so idk if they are suspects.

At any rate, thanks. I suppose I'll give it a little time to be extra sure, and then start turning processes back on slowly over time and if I am able to figure out specifically which one it was that caused this issue, or if the issue comes back before I turn anything back on, I'll update this thread.

ArctycFcx  I would suspect the Razer apps first, as they've been known to conflict with Sims 4 at various times.  Uninstalling and reinstalling them is usually enough to clear up the issue, but of course it's best to test at least once with them removed.

As for why the game is hammering the C drive, I'm not sure, but I always suspect the EA App whenever something weird and unreasonable is happening.  Running the App in offline mode (with your computer online) cuts through most shenanigans without affecting how the game itself runs, although it does cut off your access to the Gallery.  But it's a reasonable choice if you can't address the issue any other way.

Well... Follow-up. Upon further testing, it did not, in fact, solve the problem. Things run smoothly for a bit longer it seems, but the lockups still happen. I tried putting the EA app back in offline mode, but still got lockups after that.

I also ran a chkdsk and that came back with no issues, so, I'm at a loss again.

ArctycFcx  Would you like to keep troubleshooting the issue?  If so, it's worth doing a repair install of Windows given the variety of errors in your dxdiag.

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

This shouldn't delete any of your data, but if you get to step 14 and are NOT asked to keep personal files and apps, back out and start over.

If that doesn't help either, let me know and we'll go from there.