crashes when created new sim or house. brand new pc 1 week old. pentium 4 3.0ghz radeon 9800se graphic card. catalyst 4.10 drivers. windows xp home ed. 1024 mb ram 1.8gb hard drive with 1.6gb free. installed fine, played for 3 hours 1st session. then crashes to black screen,turns monitor off,monitor will not return have to boot up again.tried different monitor same thing crashes to black screen and turns monitor off. sound still on,system still running but monitor on standby. now gameplay lasts max of 30 mins before the above crash occurs. have tried all listed suggestions from many a site. my old system was amd athlon 1.4 ghz,384mb memory, 20 gb hardrive and 64mb nvidia graphics card running on windows 2000. the sims 2 run with no problems. any suggetsions will be greatly appreciated.
Smells like a video problem. Does ALT-TAB or Ctrl-Alt-Del do anything during the crash? Could possibly be the video driver acting up. Many a driver upgrade on my video card has resulted in system instability - being a nVidia user, there's about 10 recent Forceware drivers out there; some work, some don't. But since there's only 1 recent version of Catalyst, 4.10 (or so it seems), I don't know. You could try downloading the beta Catalyst 4.9 drivers. Just remember to keep the 4.10 driver install on the hard drive just in case.
Well, assuming your drivers are all up to spec, and the game will run fine initially for a fairly long time, before locking up.... Firstly, how does the lockup affect the system? Can you still ALT-TAB or ALT-CRTL-DEL, or does the entire video card thing fail? I know I say this a lot, but it's always possible the culprit, given that it works fine for some duration, then the graphics go, and then it the duration it will run after a reboot is consistently shortened, is heat. Is your video card exceptionally toasty after this happens? The newer cards tend to run hotter than old cards and need better cooling. I also recall the 9800 SE has a weaker cooling system than the 9800 Pro, that only barely squeaks by, and you may be encountering this weakness, given that TS2 is a stressful and demanding application.
Dunno, I have never yet had any machine suffer from overheating. One of them (my cousin's) had no case fans, and the AGP Geforce2 MX inside had NO HEATSINK/FAN. When I first opened the case, I was quite shocked seeing the coolingsystem-less video card. Anyway, it ran fine, and none of the crashes we experienced matched the normal symptoms of overheating - and games like Warcraft 3 and GTA3 were being run more or less continuously, around the clock. I'm in doubt that overheating is truly the problem, unless your case is very poorly ventilated - in that case, try removing the side panels of the case and see if things improve.
