Too Much of a good thing Is A Bad Thing. . . What's too much?

Too Much of a good thing Is A Bad Thing. . . What's too much?

How do you know when your neighborhood is too full? How do you know when you have too many downloads for your computer to handle?

It was taking over 15 minutes to load my game, so I trimmed back, mainly on hair and makeup. It was doing pretty well until I downloaded JMP's "Director's Cut" and many more hacks and mods. Slow, slow, slow. Cut back again. Even took out some of JMP's more "anti-social" hacks, like his "No free ride" hack. (gasp! Sorry, JMP. That one just wasn't for me.) Then went on a downloading spree over the last week. Well, guess what? It took over 20 minutes for my game to load last night!!!

Some of it has to be the number of sims I have. We had a long discussion about the foolishness of having 10 sim children born of the same family. Well, I still have not duplicated that feat, but I have some that are close.

Okay, just got out a pad and pencil and did a count. I have 64 sims in my neighborhood. This does not count Townies, but it does count non-NPCs that are deceased. I have 14 sims at the University that were NOT counted in the original count.

Several of these Sims really have not plot or purpose, they are just there, my own "townies", if you like. Some of these sims are townies that have been married into a family. JMP says deletion is a no-no. If I kill them off, the game still has to remember and keep track of them, right? Even if I delete their tombstone?

 

I have a neighborhood with 100 of my own sims plus all the townies and it runs just fine, with the exception of the haunted house, which is huge and has three ghosts.

So my guess is, it's your hacks. I find if I have a lot of new downloads it takes a while for the game to load the first time, but afterwards it isn't an issue.

So again, I think it's the hacks.

This is just based on my limited knowledge of how computers work so someone feel free to correct me ...

 

I also agree that it is unlikely to be the size of your neighborhopod population. I have noticed my own load/save times are beginning to increase again (after the machine was running like greased-lightning following a Windows reinstall) and the lag is becoming obvious ... and immune to defrags. MY dowloads folder is quite respectable these days (a little over 100MB ... LOL I remember saying to someone back in 1990 that no home-user could possibly fill a 40MB hard disc ) I try to dump out some stuff that I no longer use before adding in fresh stuff. To be honest the catalog can get awful tedious when there's too much in it.

It might also be worthwhile checking that you haven't got some rogue process going on ... I've had two problem processes that hogged resources that were not spyware or malicious. One was Sim City 4; after closing out the process remained running in the background. It was so noticeable though I soon went looking for it to force it to shut. A similar things keeps happening with MS Outlook. I tell it to go away and it does ... or at least that's what I thought ... I now Ctrl Alt Delete and look thru the processes running before trying to start TS2. It's amazing how slow it runs when Outlook is taking a sneaky peak at my emails every 10 minutes. (I first found out this happening the second time I started up Outlook and found unread mail already in the Inbox ... it's not supposed to get mail immediately after opening!)

 

JMP had a thread on this on his new forum. If you go into your neighborhood files and right click on "characters" and check properties, it will give you the total population count (including NPCs, townies, etc) for your neighborhood. He said 800+ was bad news.

I shut everything off including my cable access when playing. I kept having automatic updates and virus checks try to run while playing.

My loading time has gotten longer, too. I think I could cut it down if I knew how to tell the poly count of each download. I'm willing to eliminate those that are absurd...if I knew what kind of range that entails. I've become ruthless at weeding things out but I don't have a handle on the clothing. I can't even tell what mesh goes with which outfit. I'd love to downsize this section. I have 1.12 GB of downloads and my game takes about 3-5 minutes to load. 15 minutes does seem excessive.

 

Too much of a good thing....is an AWESOME thing! It's too much of an awesome thing, that's really bad, and dumb.

And hacks do not have any impact on the loading time of the game, because these are tiny files. Something else is causing your massive load time inflation.

What, you didn't like that one? You WANT everyone to move out with only a crappy magic 20K out of absolutely nowhere no matter how much money they have?

 

I can see its downside when a Sim has only $1000 in his name. But $100,000...yeah that's great.

 

Well, obviously, you don't move out when you only have $1000. People with such severe cash shortages that they can't even buy an empty lot end up still having to live with their parents like the losers they are.

 

I now use the FFS "no free 20K" and money order hacks. It does make the game more interesting. The wealthy Toussaint elders, who are starting to look immortal, have nevertheless set all their kids up with substantial wedding 'gifts' ... the eldest daughter lives at home having brought back 12K from uni, while her husband inherited well over 20K when his parents died as well bringing another 10-20K with him when he moved in

 

Okay, last night I had Hubby run the disk cleanup while I was cooking dinner, and he just carried on about the huge number of files I had, like, several thousand KB. I started the game and it took an entire 3 minutes to load, from the end of the movie (which I just Esc out of anyway) to the neighborhood-selection screen coming on. So, that must have been the problem.

I'll have to go check out the "MoreAwsomeThanYou" website and see what tidbits of knowledge JMP has to dish out on the subject.

 

Of course I didn't mean your hacks, JMP. I just thought it was possible that some OTHER person's hacks had screwed up her load times somehow, not because it was big but because it was buggy.

I too have noticed some slowness in my game. Time to get rid of the downloads I don't actually use, and defrag that disk, methinks ...

 

I defrag my comp every night. My teens download and burn a lot of music. Those files seem to be the worst culprits. If I wait a week it takes hours to defrag. If I do it nightly it takes only a few minutes.

I hate aspects of windows xp. My kids do not have admin privileges on their individual accounts because I'm absolutely convinced they would let every person on the face of the earth have access. I have to log onto each person's account and clear cookies, history, and temp files. I have to run a disc cleanup on each account. Is there a better way to do this? This has to be the most time consuming piddly thing I have to do daily.

 

I believe in Control Panel there is an option for scheduled tasks...Control panel-Preformance and Maintaince-Scheduled Tasks-Add Scheduled TaskIf in classic view, click on Scheduled Tasks in CP.

 

You can defrag your entire computer EVERY night? That must take forever. I have 2 80 GB drives. It takes the better part of a day to defrag that. If I tried, I'd never get anything done.

 

Defragging your hard drive is really not that effective. Its one of those myths that Microsoft like to propigate. The best way to ensure that your PC is quick, is make sure you have a) enough memory b) a decent cpu and c) enough memory. Other than that, one of the best things to do is create a seperate user on your PC just to run TS2. And then make sure that in that user profile, any other programs that run in the background are disabled.

 

Ahhh...you go ahead and brag, old man. *I* don't have 2 80 GB drives. (Just one.) I'm positive Kristalrose doesn't either. You don't share your comp with others. Mine is about 5 years old with a lower end acceptable video card. By some miracle it seems to play Sims2 perfectly. Now, I'm not sure what part of "If I wait a week it takes hours to defrag. If I do it nightly it takes only a few minutes" wasn't clear.
I prefer devoting 5 minutes to this nightly rather than waiting for hours at another date.

garyalexza, I wouldn't have a clue what microsoft says. I do this because I can tell a huge difference in all my games. Surely you've noticed that there are at least three types of computer gamers. There are those that are technical minded and could build a comp from scratch. There are a number who have a clue and can follow a techie's directions...or at least fake it. And then there is that vast third category. To many, all these instructions sound like: "OK, go to the wop doodle in the hooma drive and drag the bogunkie to the waddle. You know where that is, don't you? It's always under the game file where your shweesh are kept." If my games work well by defragging nightly and it lags if I don't...it would be amazingly stupid not to defrag, wouldn't it?

Until Sims, I've been able to play games just fine without looking too closely under the hood of my computer. I've chosen Pescado as my mechanic. If he says, "DON'T DO THAT!!!"...I don't. I don't understand iterations...don't particularly want to. But I know they are causing untold bugs...because Pescado says so. So I follow this mechanic from site to site and religiously download whatever he says to. I've had no glitches. No bugs. No freezing. No problems. In this arena, I'm an admitted sheep. I'm an old woman and find technical discussions of computers the most mind numbingly boring topic imaginable. I just want the freakin game to play.

 

On hard drives ... defragging doesn't have to take an age if it is done regularly. The main reason for defragging to improve the contiguity of frequently accessed files, making sure to keep them in the most accessible locations within the disc's index structure. The modern ultra-fast hard drives (with the fastest access times) will noticeably and substantially rack up the performance of a computer and they require much less de-fragging because the access times, bit-transfer rates, and built-in cache memory all compensate for the shortcomings of the way Windows treats files. It is one reason to learn the basics of computer construction (it's like Lego IMO) so that you can be independent of manufacturers. I am content with my current self-build system and will remain so for some time. I cannot see the point of trading up to a 64bit cpu because it'll be years before there's enough software (that I want) to fully exploit one. My display card is relatively cheap (FX 5600) but it's loaded with ram & it copes. Older (and/or cheaper) computers often have quite slow and clunky hard discs and replacing them is not a cheap option because the supplied software will often not reinstall on a substantially altered rebuild ... meaning that you would also need to buy (at least) an off the shelf copy of Windows.

 

Abso-blooming-lutely!! Pescado is the nearest thing we, the community of simmers, have to a non-profit prophet ... and how unlikely is that otherwise oxymoronic epithet in this day an age?

I'm the wrinkly old feeb here. Besides I gotta younger sister who is older than you ... just ...

Oops. Hope you skipped o'er the above nerdish ramble

 

Now, now, Mirelly...it's important to underplay this slightly. He's mentioned frequently he was born with a large cranium so to inflate it even more might be dangerous. I've personally always enjoyed him most as a rogue landmine scattered throughout various forums waiting to obliterate some unsuspecting poster (as long as it's NOT me ). Now that he's famous and all, he's followed by this group I term the "tap dancing ya-ya sisterhood". He needs a little more hard times...he's surrounded by too much bliss. The only real pescadoesque post I've seen in ages was about the Florida hurricanes on MTS2. He actually found the only human in simdom who didn't know who he was.

I believe we are only talking about degrees of "old"! I had a rude awakening recently. My son noticed my hubby nibbling on my neck and I thought the child was going to be ill. He said...and I quote..."But you're OLD! That's just gross!!!"

I want you to know that I did read it! I didn't understand most of it...but I did struggle through it. (You know what's really sad? I DO have a degree in computer programming! It's about 25 years old. Computers filled a room, service people were flown in, and you input everything on key punched cards. I think they did what a 5 dollar calculator does today. I don't know how I missed the boat for pc's....but it's certainly apparent to all that I did.)

 

nya! He's a pussy cat really.

 

yeah sure! a pussycat til he rips your lips off.