game crashing on startup
Hello! The last time I was able to play the Sims4 was in July, and this was shortly after I got a completely brand new laptop. Since then, I have not been able to startup the game at all and the farthest I have gotten is a white screen before the game completely crashes. I have reached out to many friends in the community and tried troubleshooting, and it seems no one has a solution for me. Here are the steps I have taken so far.
- Removed all non-EA content like mods and cc from the computer.
- Removed all game and save files from the computer.
- Removed all game files and let new ones generate.
- Uninstalled the game, EA, and deleted all files related to both, and then reinstalled.
I have had no success or even any progress so far, and I have also gone through other minor troubleshooting techniques from friends. I have attached a dxdiag, but unfortunately I do not know how to read it. Please let me know if you can find anything at all that could be causing this issue. I really miss playing the game and would love to have it back! Thank you so much.
@illusiveangel Thanks for the dxdiag, which shows some interesting errors, but nothing definitively tied to Sims 4. A few of the errors are crashes of the USB-C driver, and there are generic Windows update errors as well, so please start with a couple of basic checks of 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
Disconnect all USB-C devices you're using. Restart your computer, hit Windows key-i, select Update & Security, and click the box to check for updates. If any install, restart again afterwards. You can reconnect your USB-C devices after this.
For Sims 4, it's possible any related crashes were crowded out of the dxdiag by newer errors. It's also possible the game isn't crashing but rather being blocked from starting at all, perhaps due to your antivirus. So please set exceptions in yours for TS4_x64, TS4_DX9_x64, and TS4_Launcher_x64; or the entire Bin folder they're in. Set one for EADesktop.exe as well.
If none of this helps, please look for new errors 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 attempt to launch Sims 4, specifically after you've done the steps I listed. 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.
