Hi,
I'm running a PC desktop with Windows 10 and no CC or mods. About an hour into gameplay my game crashed to a black screen. No warnings. I could not get back to my desktop and had to manually reboot my PC. What is wrong and why does this happen? How do I prevent this from happening?
@kittell17 Hi again. Please run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.
https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/
I attached the crash report. Thanks again for your help! 🙂
Edit - I deleted it because you have already seen it.
@kittell17 None of the errors in your dxdiag relate directly to Sims 4, although one of them could have caused the crash. (They could also be related to your internet issues from before, but since the dxdiag doesn't have timestamps, it's impossible to say without more information.) Since they're system errors, it's best to start with a couple of checks of your Windows system files. Here's how:
If sfc reports that it found corrupt files and was unable to fix some of them, please stop here and let me know. Otherwise, restart your computer, and manually run any pending updates. Hit Windows key-i, select Update & Security, and click the button to check for updates.
Restart again, and go ahead and play. If you get another black screen, check the Reliability Monitor for related errors. Hit Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes; you'll see a chart of errors and updates, with a column for each day. Today is on the far right. Look for any errors that mention Sims 4 or Origin, or any with a timestamp matching the crash. (The timestamps can be up to an hour off.)
For any entry you find, click "View technical details," copy the information into a text document (Notepad is fine), and attach it to a post. Or, if there's only one error, you can just copy it directly into a post and put it under a spoiler.
My computer finally did update and install 3 important Windows files. And the restore health and scan now produced no errors. The only thing remaining that I could not perform was the Reliability Monitor. When I typed what you said in, Windows said that it does not exist. Weird. After that initial black screen that forced me to reboot my PC (this is all before performing your steps), I had some minor black screens (approx 3-4 times) that lasted mere seconds. Sims 4, however, runs normally otherwise except for Origin going offline now and again.
So the question remains if I need to perform that last step as you suggested, or is there something more that I need to do. Thanks again.
@kittell17 There are a few different ways to open the Reliability Monitor. You can type "reliability" into the search box; the "view reliability history" option will open it. Control Panel > Security & Maintenance > Maintenance > View Reliability History works too.
The point of this though is to look for information on any crashes. If you don't get another crash, you don't have to look. From what you've described though, this sounds like it's not going to just disappear. It would be useful to check after any black screen, even if it's just temporary; maybe wait at least a couple minutes to look, in case the data doesn't show up right away.
@puzzlezaddict Hmm. Not sure why I keep getting an error when I am trying to upload the Reliability report here. The original .xml could not be uploaded, and when I changed it to a .txt file I keep getting this error message whenever I try to upload it as an attachment: "The attachment's reliability file.txt content type (text/plain) does not match its file extension and has been removed."
And the data from yesterday's crashes (May 13) was never on the report. It has been at least 8-9 hours since I played the Sims 4 game too. The only errors that I have seen are days ago when I was having network and connectivity issues, and yes there were some Origin reports too as well back then. Origin still goes on and off but no reports on it on May 13 either even though I was experiencing that during the crashes.
@kittell17 Alright, if there's nothing related to the Sims 4 crashes in the Reliability Monitor, then don't bother trying to upload the reports. If you do see Sims crash-related info in the future, you can highlight, copy, open Notepad, paste, and it should automatically save as a .txt file. Or you can past the text into a reply here, but please use a spoiler.
The next step here though is hardware monitoring. Please download hwinfo from here:
https://www.hwinfo.com/download/
You don't even need to install anything: just download the portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you want. (If you would like to install, be sure to click the green button, not the orange one.) Restart your computer, open hwinfo, choose "sensors only," and click the icon that's a sheet of paper with a + sign to start logging. Save the log file to your desktop or somewhere else convenient.
Wait five minutes, then open Origin and Sims 4, and play. Don't open anything else. Normally, I'd say play for 20 minutes or until you get a crash, but if this issue is intermittent, hwinfo might not pick up the problem until it actually shows up. So just play normally, and if you see a problem, quit and end loggind by clicking the same icon. If there aren't any issues, you can trash the log and get a new one the next time you play.
Upload the log file to a third-party free filehosting site, and link it here. Please leave it in .csv format, unless you use OneDrive to upload it, in which case zip it up first.
Forgive my ignorance but could you tell me what a spoiler is and how to do one here for files?
I don't know when I will be able to do that next crash report. I don't like using file hosting sites because I am always afraid of security issues. Is there some other way to attach the file?
@kittell17 It's not a crash report, it's a log of hardware data. You can try attaching it to a post—it's too big to just put in the text body—but that often corrupts the log. If you do attach it, change the extension to .txt (as in, hwinfolog.txt, not hwinfolog.csv.txt). But if my log reader can't open it, as has happened before, you'll need to upload it elsewhere instead.
For Reliability Monitor reports, they're short enough to put in the body of a reply. The spoiler button is with the other formatting buttons; it's a triangle with an exclamation point. Highlight the text you want to put under the spoiler and click the button.
I tried to copy and paste the Reliability thing via spoiler, but it was too large and far exceeds the max word length here. I am sorry for all this inconvenience, truly.
