Sims 4 crashes repeatedly

@fernlocke  Thanks for the dxdiag and for already doing so much testing.  There are a couple things you didn't mention that are worth trying, if you haven't already.  One is to play with no peripherals connected to your laptop, not even a mouse.  Restart after disconnecting the devices and before trying to play.

Another is playing in a new admin Windows account.  Make it local, as in, don't link it to your Microsoft account.  This will cover any potential issues limited to your main account and is a helpful way to narrow things down a bit.  I would suggest trying a clean boot there too, as you've done before, just to be thorough.  If you've already tried it and it didn't help, let me know.

Your dxdiag also shows a couple of crashes of a component of the intelliGo Audio Service, which likely came pre-installed on your laptop.  While a clean boot would normally disable this, it's possible the service is entwined tightly enough with your Realtek sound driver that it keeps running.  You can uninstall it through the Device Manager if you want to be sure it's not a problem.

I don't know that these crashes happened at the same time as you were playing though.  If you want to find out, open the Reliability Monitor (Windows key-R, perfmon /rel ) for recent crashes that happened while you were playing.  The component in question is iGoSwServer.exe; if it crashed when Sims 4 did, that confirms it's involved in some way.

One somewhat random suggestion I have that's easy to test is to force-limit the game to 60 fps.  You shouldn't need to, and your hardware obviously can handle a much higher load, but it's possible the game engine is the problem and not anything specific to your system.  It's more likely that this is unrelated, but as I said, it's a simple test.  Go into Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4, open Options.ini, search for frameratelimit , and set it to 60.  You can always undo the setting later.

While you're there, force the game to run in windowed mode as well.  If you can't open the options at the Main Menu, you can edit Options.ini to set fullscreen to 0 (zero).

Please test using a new save each time, if you can get that far, and still with no mods or custom content; and keep using the new Windows account until the game is stable again.

I appreciate your suggestions so much as I had not tried these. Here's what all I did based on your suggestions (all reboots are clean boots).

From my main account:

The first thing I tried was setting the FPS to 60 and set to windowed. I left it this way for the majority of my testing but it had no impact.

The only peripheral I have is a mouse so unplugged and rebooted. Sims appeared to work great after this! Rebooted a few times and launched the game a few times. I was leaving the game on the main menu and not creating a new game since it tends to crash within the first few minutes of launch. I plugged back in my normal mouse, launched the game, crash on the menu. Unplugged it, reboot, launched the game, seemed stable, tried a different mouse, also stable. Since that seemed stable, created a new sim family and played for a long while (over 2 hours!). Had a little cry that it was finally working after all these months and it was just the stupid effing mouse and then CRASH. Once this happened, every subsequent attempt to load into a game, new or the one I had just created, failed with or without a mouse plugged in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  This isn't the first time this has happened either. I will make some sort of random change, do the reboot, and it will let me play to the point where I think I've finally fixed it, and then suddenly crash. 

Perfmon's definitely going back in my troubleshooting notebook, that was pretty helpful! I ran it and iGoSWServer was not crashing at the same time as Sims, but I still uninstalled the corresponding add-on software and disabled the driver anyway cos why not at this point. It did not make any impact on gameplay. I don't see anything else crashing at the same time Sims crashes.

As local admin:

Created the local admin account and tried. This was somehow worse. It wouldn't even load into the game menu at all even with clean boot and antivirus off. Normally it will at least load into the game menu after a few tries but not on this account.

Back to main account:

I decided at this point to uninstall again and install ONLY the base game. This worked great. Clean boot, antivirus on, original mouse plugged in, fresh install with just the base game and it ran fine, played for roughly an hour. When I exited the game, the EA app had downloaded and installed ALL of the game packs and add-ons I own. I double checked the settings and everything available to configure in the EA app was disabled so I have no idea why the EA app downloaded them anyway. Uninstalled again, cleaned directories, switched to local admin.

Back to local admin:

Deleted Electronics Arts folder from this user's Documents. Verified I didn't see any other EA/Electronics Arts stuff other than EA Desktop app. Reboot. Downloaded only base game, tried to launch, video card error (because it isn't in the GraphicsCards.sgr) then it crashed (it does not crash here on main account) and from then on I can't even launch the game at all. Restart EA app and then, despite having automatic downloads and everything else disabled in EA app settings, it STILL automatically starts to download every single pack I own and I have to cancel every individual one to get it to stop. I don't see anywhere that will let me bulk cancel everything in the download queue which is frustrating. Once it starts downloading these add-ons, it won't let me launch the game again until those packs are installed or I've cancelled all the pending downloads.

I tried to launch the game after I got them all cancelled and it let me into the game menu and all the way into a new game. Minimized so I could see the EA app and of course, there it goes downloading every single add on yet again....

Is there any way to force this to stop somewhere besides in the EA app settings? Am I somehow missing a setting to disable?? Is this even worthwhile trying?

@fernlocke  The EA App does this to everyone, as far as I can tell.  I haven't found a way to block downloads either, except with a very janky workaround that is definitely not supported.  But what you can do is disable some or all packs from loading.  Here's how:

https://sims4.crinrict.com/eng/2017/03/disable-single-packs/

For the crashes, I've asked someone else to look over this thread and will be back (or the other person will be) with a second opinion.

@fernlocke 

I am the person @puzzlezaddict referred to.

Which VC++ redistributables did you reinstall?
Did you uninstalled the VC++ redistributables before you reinstalled. (No need to do it if not, just a question.)

• Press the Windows key and "R" at the same time.
• In the new Window, type or copy and paste "%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps" (Without the quotation marks) > Press ENTER
• Look if there are any "TS4_x64.exe.Xxxx.dmp" files in the "..Local\CrashDumps" folder.
• Zip 2 - 3 "TS4_x64.exe.Xxxx.dmp" files together and upload them at a free file hosting service like Dropbox or Onedrive.
• Post the link here.

If there aren't any dump files of ME:

• Press the Windows key > Write: Command Prompt > Right click on "Command Prompt" in the search results > Run as administrator.
• Copy and paste:
  reg add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\devenv.exe" /v DumpType /d 2 /t REG_DWORD
  into the prompt Window > Press ENTER.
• Play the game until it crashes.
• After the game crashes, let all Windows crash dialogues finish.
• Press the Windows key and "R" at the same time. > Type "%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps" (Without the quotation marks) into the new window > Press ENTER.
• Zip 2 - 3 "TS4_x64.exe.Xxxx.dmp" files together and upload them at file hosting service like Dropbox or you can use the Onedrive "public" folder.
• Post the link here.
  
  
  If you want to undo the automatic dump creation, use the command below in a elevated command prompt (As in point 1) reg delete "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps" /f

I also like you to test the game running on your CPU graphics.

For the VC++, I followed the instructions EA support provided from here: 
https://help.ea.com/help/origin/origin/your-vc-runtime-package-has-not-installed-correctly-error-troubleshooting/

So this would have been vc2010sp1, vc2013, vc2015, and vc2019 folders. I actually have newer 2015-2022 which is version 14.36.32532.0. The 32 and 64 bit version of all of them are installed. ((I did not specifically uninstall/reinstall these, I just did a repair on the ones it would let me))

There are crash dumps. Logs are here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/vatgcrn18i9lpcaw9auov/h?rlkey=x3353pk7s9zdhegbe7u4s3z75&dl=0

The ones from today (2/5) were with the game set to use the Intel UHD internal graphics and the last crash was with a freshly reinstalled game.

One thing to note that might be of some relevance - when I reinstall the full game, base and all add-ons, the EA app itself crashes part way through. I restart the app and it continues downloading and a few more service packs and it crashes again. I have not been able to watch the whole time to see which pack it's on when it crashes, but when I restarted the EA app the first time, it resumed on the Parenthood pack so I'm assuming that's the one it crashed on. The second EA app crash I didn't catch which pack but I think it was Snowy Escape? Not sure if it's relevant or not, but every time I do a full download of the base game and all packs, the EA app crashes partway through. 

The game crashed with this fresh install, but I rebooted, repaired the game, reboot, and has been stable since. Currently still set to internal graphics. This is likely another false hope period it likes to do just to screw with me, especially since it crashed while set to internal graphics before this. I'll put a new crash dump file in the dropbox once it happens.

Aaaaand it crashed. Latest crash dump:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p8tadpvy7bteglx4isni8/TS4_x64.exe.12856.dmp?rlkey=emi4g1lkm6lxuzhp064ij6oc6&dl=0

@fernlocke 

The problem is that that "python37_x64.dll" is trying to writhe to an area in RAM that is invalid.

Normally this would be a pretty clear case of a faulty application, except we know hat this is not the case here, the game works fine for many people.

Coupled with the fact that the EA app crashes on downloading the packs, I would assume that there is a problem in your system.

But it might be complicated to pinpoint, as this problem can have many reasons, software and hardware side.

Is there and XMP profile set in your Alianware notebooks BIOS? If yes, disable it and test.

I actually can't do any sort of overclocking on this laptop as I end up getting BSOD when I try to even change the settings. In BIOS, XMP is disabled. I did see the memory access violation last night and ran through a series of stress tests on memory, CPU, SSD, and both the integrated graphics and Nvidia, all tested fine.

Guess I'll be opening a ticket with Dell. It's just so strange that it only affects this game (so far). I know Sims worked fine on my old laptop so I didn't think there was a bug with the game itself but just something incompatible on my PC. I was hoping we could pinpoint exactly what, but I think there may be an underlying hardware issue here.

Thank you for all your help!

@fernlocke 

So you are saying you get a BSOD if you enable the XMP profile?
If so this support ticket is a good idea anyway.  👍

Yep, exactly. It is currently disabled and if I try to change it from either the Alienware command center application or directly from bios, it blue screens and then reverts the change back to disabled. Hopefully Dell will be able to diagnose and fix.