Game crashing to blue screen... And the graphics card people are no help. First thing's first: 1: Intel 1.86 GHz 2: 1.00 GB of RAM 3: 188 GB of free disk space 4: 228 GB total disk space 5: Radeon X1300/X1550 Series Secondary graphics card 6: 8.453.0.0 driver (dated 1/22/08) 7: DirectX version 9.0c 8: Windows XP 9: Sims2 CD Version 10: Sims2, Uni, NL, OFB, Pets, Seasons, BV, FT, FFS, Glamour, Celebration, H&M, Teen Stuff (basically, every SP and EP out) 11: I use maintenance hacks, and last night I went and made sure they were all FT ok. But I had the problem when I was running the game vanilla, too. 12: Problem: Blue screen of death. Sometimes after an hour of playing, sometimes as soon as I take the game off pause when entering a lot. The blue screen says: STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005, 0xBF1c393c, 0xA1BFB808) and then it says there is something wrong with the file ati3duag.dll I've been e-mail someone at AMD, but they're no help. They want me to put the graphics card in another computer, or put another card in my computer to make sure it's the graphics card. Problem: no extra graphics card, no extra computer. So the guy tells me to take the card to a store and have them test it. Well, I only get the blue screen when I'm playing Sims. Does Best Buy normally install Sims 2 on their company computers to test graphics cards? I doubt it. Does anyone here in their infinite wisdom have anything better to suggest? Anything? I'm begging. Extra info: I tried rolling back the drivers, no dice. This was happening before I installed FT, also, so it's not that EP. Like I said, it happened in a vanilla game. Did my computer (that I bought specifically to play this game less than a year and half ago) finally go kaput?
Uninstall all Radeon applications/drivers and download the following: http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp This driver was released just a few days ago. Give it a shot to see if that corrects the problem...
Thanks for the reply Jud. I uninstalled all Radeon stuff and installed the driver you recommended. Now, I get to go test it. I'll let you know if it works.
So, I'm not getting blue screen crashes anymore. Now, I'll be playing, and the game will just crash back to the desktop with the error message "The application has crashed." This is really bugging me because I did a complete uninstall and re-install last night, and it still happened. Any suggestions?
Is that all the error message says? Does it not spit out an error code? I don't know how good the Radeon X1300/X1550 card is...but I'm beginning to wonder if the card is faulty.
That's all the little box says. The application has crashed. You know, I find it interesting that all this crap started happening just after my 2 year warranty expired. Coincidence? I think not!!
If the game has been working since you installed the drivers in March I would expect it to now be either the games fault or some kind of custom content in the game. The BSOD was caused by some kind of driver fault but it seems that problem is fixed now that its no longer occurring. If the game has been working since you installed the drivers I would recommend that you firstly remove all custom content and see if the game crashes and if it still crashes, try another reinstall.
How often are you saving? It may not be a graphics card problem. I notice that you have only 1 gb of RAM, which is not much when you have all the EPs and SPs loaded. Yes, it's more than the posted amount, but it's still not much when you consider all the games. You also didn't mention how much memory your graphics card has. If it's only 256mb, then that's another area where you might be stressing with having all the games loaded. You might try saving more frequently (such as every 15 minutes of real time play). I've found that it really helps.
Well, the game would crash within 5 minutes of it being loaded, so saving was not really the problem. However, after leaving my beloved computer with the Best Buy Geek Squad for 2 days, the problem is fixed. It was in fact a RAM problem, as Kat suggested. I now have 2 gigs of RAM, and I just updated my graphics card driver. I am happy to say that I spent about 10 hours playing TS2 yesterday with NO problems. Yipee!!!
