"The Sims 3 has stopped working" - constant crashing.

I bought The Sims 3 years ago, worked fine. I then bought World Adventures and Late Night and again, worked fine. I then got Pets for Christmas, was working fine until about a week ago when it froze every so often when i went to the map view, i would then have to press the desktop button and the message "The Sims 3 has stoppe working" would appear... un-installed all of the games and reinstalled them, didn't work. Then started freezing, during game play as well, unistalled them again and reinstalled - again no luck. I have turned off all the DEP on the exe files of every game, still no luck.

I have tried trouble shooting all the games and no luck there.

I have:
HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 430 @ 2.27GHz
Installed Memory: 3.00 GB (2.86 GB usable)
64-bit Operating System
Windows 7

Thank you so much for any help given, I just want to get back to normal game play!!

Libby

So this is on a laptop? I mean, that could be it. The machine is not strong enough to play it, and it crashes. It likely hardware issues and not the game at all. You should also make sure all the game are fully updated and that you update your video drivers.

Have you got the latest updates for the games?

Hi! Thanks for quick replies!

Yes this is on a laptop, it's a new laptop so i don't see why it wouldn't support it and i think i've updated my video cards, could you please tell me how to do this just in case?
It worked fine for years and yes i have all the updates!

thanks so much

You might need to lower the in game settings to something different. Since you installed expansion packs your computer might be running out of memory.

Also do you know what kind of video card you have?

nckfrtg28 said:

Also do you know what kind of video card you have?

Click to expand...

He has the ones integrated on the cpu, its probably Intel 3000 graphics. just lower your setting on the Sims, so it doesn't overheat and crash on you.

I have an average windows 7 desktop and have this same problem, i've messed around with the computer's settings, reinstalled EVERYTHING and even asked the geek squad from best buy and still get that "sims 3 has stopped working and will now close (crash)" textbox. It seems to be just the sims pets thats doing it - help?

libbylauren33 said:

I bought The Sims 3 years ago, worked fine. I then bought World Adventures and Late Night and again, worked fine. I then got Pets for Christmas, was working fine until about a week ago when it froze every so often when i went to the map view, i would then have to press the desktop button and the message "The Sims 3 has stoppe working" would appear... un-installed all of the games and reinstalled them, didn't work. Then started freezing, during game play as well, unistalled them again and reinstalled - again no luck. I have turned off all the DEP on the exe files of every game, still no luck.

I have tried trouble shooting all the games and no luck there.

I have:
HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 430 @ 2.27GHz
Installed Memory: 3.00 GB (2.86 GB usable)
64-bit Operating System
Windows 7

Thank you so much for any help given, I just want to get back to normal game play!!

Libby

Click to expand...

Your computer is actually too new for the sims to work perfectly on it. Ridicule uh? Anyway, the sims 3 was created before vertical sync on graphics. While vertical sync is supposed to add more smoothness to movements and fluidity to graphics, it also has a downside, games that were not programmed to support it overload your computer. In case of the sims 3, the better your computer, the higher risk the sims 3 will overheat it and crash and burn.

If you want to make a simple test to see if that is actually your crashing problem, do the following steps.

CTRL-SHIFT-C, in the command line type fps on

Then play a bit. There will be a small green number on the right top side of the screen. If that number goes anywhere above 60 in the sims 3, that may be a cause to your problem. I saw my computer go as high as 3689 fps on the loading screen.

Now the fix, it is good to understand what a fps is. Fps is frame per second that your screen will display. Now, your eyes WON'T see the difference between 120 frame per second and 1000 frame per second. 60fps is actually 60 different image shown on your computer screen each second. Imagine your computer having to display 3689 different images per second, even when they are the same image... So, if your loading screen take 5 minutes to load, at 3689 fps it will display over a million image just to load the game... No wonder your game will crash and burn after 20-30 minutes. You have been lucky it didn't actually overheated your graphic chipset as in most laptop, once it overheats.... you can't go buy a new graphic card, the whole computer has to change.

Now the fix... Simple, a fps limiter.

I hope I was useful in my answer.