Re: Screen goes black and Windows locks up
@FlamingoKicker I'm still happy to read an hwinfo log, if you want to make one. Perhaps something will jump out that makes it more clear what's happening with your computer.
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I tried somethings today like disabling SE but of course, that didn't do jack. Then I got the idea of seeing whether I could play other Origin games or if they'd crash too. I have several Non-Maxis games so I played them and they had no problems and I enjoyed playing something besides the Sims for an afternoon but at the end I went back to see about the Sims and not only did Sims 4 still crash but on a whim I wanted to see if Sims 3 would still play and it crashed but Sims 2 played fine although I doubt I will be playing it regularly anytime soon. I just keep it around for nostalgia. Would be interesting if EA would put Sims 1 on Origin but that's another issue.
I will have to scroll back thru and find out about that hwinfo.log and run one. I must have missed that email or had other things on my mind.
OK, I got the hwinfo app and ran it but something didn't work right on my computer cause it would crash to the blue screen of death each time I had the log running and then tried to launch Sims 4. Maybe my computer is just too old or the CPU isn't powerful enough to handle the program?
@FlamingoKicker Hwinfo is a very lightweight program, and I've never heard of it causing a BlueScreen. Were you running anything else, for example GPU-Z, at the same time?
At any rate, please upload the minidump(s) for the BSODs. Open a File Explorer window and enter C:\Windows\Minidump. For any logs that were written around the time you saw the BlueScreens, right-click and select Copy, then right-click on your desktop and Paste. You can zip the logs together, upload them to a free filesharing site, and link them here,
Regarding the blue screen issue and HWinfo, I found a posting on line where they mention people having this problem with old out of date hardware drivers. I have checked all my devices though thru Device Manager and none of mine need updating so if I just have old stuff that's not compatible with the program then maybe that's the issue?
Either way I didn't have anything else running in the background at the time. In fact I went and made sure everything wad shut down in Task Manager and from the tool bar.
Oh, my new graphics card arrived so I'll have that installed tomorrow and see if that was a pointless purchase or if it helps.
@FlamingoKicker It's entirely possible that one of your components doesn't have a new enough driver to play nice with hwinfo. However, I've had people run it on pre-2010 computers without issues, so it's not only the age of the hardware.
Anyway, if the new graphics card doesn't fix the problem, please let me know.
It's looking promising. I replaced my old Radeon with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. Still checking out my programs to see which ones are running and which aren't (my backup software for some reason now isn't working properly. I guess it's always something. But I did restore my Sims back to a time when I knew it was working correctly so I should be back in business except for some reason I can't get my Saved Files to show up properly so I may just have to forget about them and start creating families new and more forward).
If it doesn't crash to black screen I can live with losing my families.
Wow! I can't believe all it took was replacing my graphics card and all my system problems went away. My game is playing flawlessly. I suspect my old Radeon card just died (or was on the way). When we took it out it was covered in a layer of dust, cat hair, ash and general grime from a decade of not being cleaned and the fan on it hadn't worked in years. That can't be good. Anyway, played the game for three years with no problems whatsoever. I wish I knew how to recover my saved files and families from my backup drive. I'm happy I can still create brand new families anyway so I guess I can live without my old families (most of whom I hadn't played in years anyway). Get to see all those default families young again. Well, thanks again for all your help and suggestions.
@FlamingoKicker I'm really glad to hear the game is working again. Sometimes hardware just dies, or at least dies enough that it can't handle a heavy load. Whether the cause was the dust and grime or some mechanical failure is hard to say, but it sounds like you don't really want to meticulously clean the old card just to find out. (I wouldn't either.)
I don't know what's up with your backup drive, but any content you've saved can be moved to the proper location in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4, and the game should read it.
The backup drive worked after I Googled the problem and someone suggested I make sure to turn off my Anti-Virus programs, cleaned my caches and temp files and then running the backup software again and of course that worked. Scary having no anti-virus protection on though or why developers can't make sure these things don't happen.
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