Crash on Idle Game

[hoaxSkeleton]

I've been having this very strange problem since September that, say, if I am playing Sims 4, everything is fine and normal for a straight half an hour, then I check my phone for 5 minutes or get up from my laptop at all, leaving the game paused, as soon as I come back I find that the game has frozen/unresponsive and I have to restart my computer. This is nearly constant. On the rare occasion when this happens the laptop entirely shuts off (though this is a heat-related issue which I believe is separate). This seems like a crash due to a complete lack of input and sometimes I am able to alleviate it by leaving the screen on someones spinning plumbob, but it still crashes most of the time. I save whenever I look away now so it's not a major problem, but I wish I didn't have to restart my computer every time I get a text. This happened before I had any mods/cc installed and is continuing to happen with mods now, in every save file, through a couple of major patches, and never occurred before sept last year (though I wasn't playing much before then). I'm curious what the underlying issue is here and if there's anything I can do to fix it.

[puzzlezaddict]

@hoaxSkeleton  Please run a dxdiag and attach it to a post.

https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/pc/how-to-gather-dxdiag-information/

It would also be worth doing some hardware monitoring, to see whether the freezes are also related to overheating.  Download hwinfo from here:

https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

You don't need to install anything if you don't want to; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you want.  (If you would like to install, be sure to click the green button, not the orange one.)  Restart your computer, and don't open any other apps.  Launch hwinfo, choose "sensors only," and click the icon that's a sheet of paper with a + sign to start logging.  Save the file to your desktop for easy access later.

Wait five minutes, then launch Sims 4 and play for 20 minutes.  (Please time it in both cases, so I can see exactly where in the log the transition happens.)  Then leave the computer alone for five minutes, make sure it's frozen, and force a restart as necessary.  The log file should be intact until the freeze; please upload it to a third-party free filehosting site and link it here.  Please leave it in .csv format, or if you use OneDrive to share, please compress it in .zip format instead.

[cowntessa]

@hoaxSkeleton this has been an issue since the november patch. i've had it non-stop since i got the snowy escape pack.

[puzzlezaddict]

@cowntessa  If you'd like to troubleshoot too, please provide the info requested above.