Sims 2 probs, please help!

**timegoblin** · October 10th, 2005, 02:52 AM

Hi guys and gals, got a real annoying prob for you to help me with. Ive built a nice little shuttle type PC for the girlfriend for internet access, music playing, dvd playback, coursework and playing a few games like her current fav, Sims 2. I stripped most of the stuff from an earlier pc that ran Sims 2 just fine but now it just wont have none of it. the old PC was as follws- Asrock motherboard, AMD 2000xp CPU, Kingston 512mb DDR 333 Ram, 80gb Fujitsu hd, Leadtek A350 5900XT 128mb graphix card and windows 2k.

New pc is an Aria Biostar IDEQ 210V barebones unit, with VIA KM400A + VT8237 chipset, AMD 2000xp CPU, 80gb Fujitsu hd, 512mb DDR, 5900XP graphix, and a Sony DVD drive.

Sims 2 installs, but when you run it will run for a while then lock up to a degree that a power off is the only way to recover. CPU isnt getting hot, neither is the graphix card, PSU is a 200w one and isnt struggling at all. Ive got Direct X9c, no problems there, tried standard and updated Nvidia drivers. I have all the windows updates, other software on the pc includes microsoft works, norton utilities, winspeedup, Sandra and prob a few other bits and peices, oh, firewall is zonealarm and anti virus is AVG.

Another pc in the house running a 950 Athlon runs it fine, thats got the same software configuration and a MX440 SE graphix card.

I juat cant nail this one down and really need help!

**NooNoo** · October 10th, 2005, 03:13 AM

OK, have you run dxdiag and done the tests?
Got the latest chipset drivers?
What version of nvidias are you running?

**timegoblin** · October 10th, 2005, 04:34 AM

I have not done a diagnostics on the direct x, how do I go about doing that? also, not updated the BIOS or anything like that as it is a new machine, i dont tend to flash BIOS chips unless its a last resort- i cant see the motherboard not liking the game though, can you? the asrock mother board that WAS running the game was an old K7 type board, one with AGP4 rather than 8, that never had a BIOS update in its life!

Graphics card driveres/ detonator drivers, well, Ive run the game with the ones that came with the card (not sure what version they are) and ive tried the latest drivers from the Nvidia website, same result.

I appreciate the help here.

**NooNoo** · October 10th, 2005, 04:41 AM

Start, Run, type in
DXDIAG
Click ok
Click each tab and run the tests.

**timegoblin** · October 10th, 2005, 05:34 AM

Ok, will try that this evening, thanx.

**timegoblin** · October 11th, 2005, 03:22 PM

Ok ladys and gents, ive solved the shuttle/sims 2 prob. looks like the FSB on the mobo was set to 100 and the BIOS FSB was set to 133, therefore, my pc was trying to overclock a processor it had just underclocked, and if you can make sense of that your doing better than me!!!

Anyway, when i set the BIOS FSB to 100, turning my nice Athlon 2000XP into a 1250 XP, it worked fine and my girlfriend is still using it thus now and is very happily playing Sims 2 next to me as we speak.

I appreciate your help and advice, and yes, i will get round to setting the FSB right someday, she is happy as it is so I'm in no hurry.

**NooNoo** · October 11th, 2005, 04:18 PM

How did you figure that out? Did Dxdiag help at all?

**timegoblin** · October 13th, 2005, 08:05 AM

Well, I must confess no, I had not tried Dxdiag on it, I really should anyway, if only to see what its like.
What made me think to try this was the fact that I had overclocked a 2000XP by setting the FSB from 133 to 166, fooling the BIOS into reading the 2000XP as a 2600XP (Kids! dont try this at home!) with decent make 333 speed DDR RAM, it worked a treat and gave me a good speed boost... until Doom3 came along! That did NOT like the overclocked cpu at all and froze up exactly like the Sims did, Id forgotten all about it as ity was a fair few months ago, but it all came flooding back to me...

Wanna put the `solved` tick on this one?