Hopefully this will help someone... being in IT I had a few more tricks up my sleeve 😕mileyvery-happy:
My daughter just got the Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and it crashes before any movie sequence / menu appeared.
Her laptop has a duel video cards installed (onboard Intel for 2D and nVidia 545m for 3D) - and the nVidia Control Panel (under Control Panel) was configurered to use "defaults". As it happens "defaults" in this case was trying to run the game using the Intel onboard crappy graphics.
Personally, if your using nVidia - I would change 2 settings within the nVidia Control Panel:
Both settings under Manage 3D Settings.
So, under Manage 3D Setting - change the detault graphics card from "automatically detect" to "NVidia"
and also change the "Set PhysX Configuration" and set to GeForce (or your 3D card).
Apply settings & try game again. Feel free to skip the movie intro - but do be patient with the loading screen, this seemed to take a while.
If that doesn't work, the readme does say try updating the graphics drivers and also turn off Virtualization in the BIOS if you still have issues.
Virtualization is switched on, on my daughter's laptop so this may only affect a small number of computers.
For reference, nVidia v335.23 drivers was used - the newer 337.88 drivers don't work. As it happens, the newer 337.88 drivers also prevents The Sims 3 from working too. If you struggle finding older nVidia drivers, I've kindly uploaded them here: https://db.tt/3Aqh55Ox
Hope that helps ! 😕mileyvery-happy:
