My game keeps crashing over and over

sarahmoonblade  As mentioned in your previous thread, we would need to see a dxdiag in order to have any insight into the issue.  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.

Thanks! I somehow missed the earlier reply. Is this okay? (I'm a little bit of a technophobe)

sarahmoonblade  That's exactly what I wanted.  The crashes in your dxdiag look like what happens on high-end Intel processors that are overclocked by default.  This is sometimes fixed by a BIOS update, but you already have the newest BIOS Asus offers for your laptop.  So you may need to change some BIOS settings manually instead.

By the way, BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System and is the software that controls how the motherboard works.  You can think of it as running under Windows, governing details about the hardware before Windows and other installed software come into play.

I don't know exactly what settings your laptop BIOS will have, but try opening it anyway, which means restarting your computer and clicking the right key (usually F12 for Asus boards, sometimes F2) when prompted.  Or you can click it repeatedly as soon as the laptop screen goes black as it's restarting.  Point is, you'll find yourself in the BIOS control panel.  Open Advanced settings and look for something called CPU Turbo Boost or similar.  It should have Turbo in the name.  Disable it, close the BIOS and let the laptop boot into Windows, and test Sims 4.

Disabling this setting won't harm your computer.  It will lower the processor's performance a little, but the CPU is so overpowered for Sims 4 that you shouldn't notice any practical difference.

Okay, so… these are my advanced options. None of these have ‘turbo’ in them 😅 I have NO idea what I’m doing and this is mildly terrifying. Can you tell me which one to disable?

sarahmoonblade  None of those have anything to do with the CPU turbo behavior, unfortunately.  But there may be another way to achieve this.

Search in Windows for the Control Panel, open it, click Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Change advanced power settings > Processor power management, and set the Maximum processor state to... let's try 95%, or 90 if that doesn't help.  You can always change it back to the default setting.

Tried this. First 95 then 90. It still crashes. It did take at least 45 minutes to crash (it’s done that before but it’s rare, usually it takes less than 15 minutes)

any other suggestions that could help? I really appreciate your time. 

sarahmoonblade  Since it took longer to crash, keep dialing the percentage back by 5% at a time until the game is stable or you get to 50, whichever comes first, and let me know what happens.

Currently at 70%. It’s not doing anything positive (game is crashing same speed it used to) but it is making my game lag like crazy. I feel this is not the solution 🙈

sarahmoonblade  Yeah, it wouldn't be ideal anyway but is clearly not helping here.  I was hoping there would be a balance where you could play the way you wanted without crashes, OR that we could say that downclocking the CPU wasn't helping.  And it sounds like the latter is the case.

Just to make sure though, you're changing the maximum, right?  The minimum wouldn't do anything.

Aside from that, it would be worth doing some hardware monitoring to see whether anything else is happening on the hardware side that should be addressed.  (And of course the logging should happen with the CPU power on default settings.)  Please download hwinfo 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 lansweeper.

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 4 and play 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.

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.

I can't seem to get it to upload in a CSV file. I think I managed to get it into a ZIP file from onedrive, but I'm not sure if I did it right. I am really struggling here. Again... I am a technophobe and all these things are very overwhelming. Let me know if I messed up and I'll try again.