Mobility Radeon 9600 - Sims 2 Hangs I have a new (3 months old laptop) and have just bought the Sims 2. It installed fine but when I run the game it works for about 2 minutes then everyting locks up, and I have to reboot the laptop . The full spec is as follows - AMD 3200+ DTR (64 bit) 1Gb RAM 40Gb free space (from a 60Gb hard drive) 128Mb Mobility Radeon 9600 - driver is 6.13.10.6378 Direct X version - 9.0c Windows XP Home (service pack 2) CD version of Sims 2 I tried upgrading the video card drivers but I get the error message - INF Error - Video driver not found, which may appear to mean that ATI are not supporting this card as it has been installed by the laptop manaufacturer, who should supply any upgrades. However surely my laptop is new enough to not require driver updates anyway. Any help would be appreciated.
Actually there is a very good possibility that the drivers could be your problem. Think about it... you got it three months ago, so your drivers are already three months back. Then, think about how long they had that particular card and software for it... could also be a few months. You said you tried updating them? I assume you mean from the ATI site, yes?
Did you try clicking on your start menu, then clicking windows update? Instead of "critical and security updates", click "custom" or "advanced" and it will check for updates to your video card. If that doesn't work.... Try running the game in a window instead of full-screen and see if that makes a difference. Right click the Sims 2 icon on your desktop, click properties, and where it says "Target", click all the way at the end of the line, (make sure the whole thing isn't highlighted), and type " -w". Make sure you include the space before the -. If it works, leave it until your video card has an updated driver available. After you update, or if it doesn't change anything, go back to properties and just remove the " -w" from the end of the string. If that doesn't work.... Did you try shutting down all the background tasks running on your system? Your TS2 manual has instructions for how to do this. Beyond that I don't think I know what to tell you. By the way, the suggestions above can be tried in any order. If it makes you feel any better - there are very few people in this world who are able to run this game without any problems. Even when their system far exceeds all the minimum requirements. EA Tech Support is useless (as you can tell from my other post) so my suggestion to you is search this site and the BBS for other people having problems with the game locking up and see what they tried.
Mobility Radeon 9600 - Sims 2 Hangs Yes it was tha ATI site. Thats where I got the info on the error message when I tried updating drivers too. My PC is made by Novatech. I'll try some of the other suggestions and get back to you on the results. Thanks for your help.
Did you try to get the ATI driver for the desktop cards? That one requires that you have the Microsoft .net framework installed. (My friend just got the desktop version of the newest ATI 9600 driver and was instructed by ATI that she had to have .net framework when she went to download it. I don't know if the mobility card has the same requirement as the desktop.) Unfortunately, the mobility cards are *not* supported by Maxis (not just the 9600 ATI mobility card). There have been issues with the 9600mobility card especially from what I've noticed on the official BBS. However, I don't know if there are ways around them.
Have you tried here for drivers and bios updates? http://www.station-drivers.com/page/atidriv%20bios.htm But TBH https://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/technical_support.html might've been your first port of call ...
