Crashing since installing University/Upgrading to Windows 7

[Gabbryrose]

Yes, I did turn off the mirrors, but so far changing the graphics settings makes no difference to the issue. I tried turning off things like the edge smoothing as well, but no difference.

I tried all of the graphics drivers last night both older and newer, BETA and WHQL, but they were all worse. I have gone back to the December driver for now, but it's back to crashing after about 15 minutes of play. (On a previous save)

It seems that the only way I can play for a continuous time is if I start a completely new save. I can play a new save for at least an hour (or possibly more, I haven't let it go any longer than that yet) without crashing. But as soon as I save it and quit, that's it. I still haven't put back any of my store content, so the game is as it was installed at this point. 

It is also still crashing any time I quit, both from the main menu and in game. Not sure if that could be related.

I am kind of at a loss on where to go next. I went through the crashing checklist on the sims wiki page and did everything on the list, but still no change.

[crinrict]

Did you try posting in the comments for CLA ? Post your complete CLA report there, maybe Ford has some more ideas.

[Gabbryrose]

Well, I spoke with Ford and I think he may have figured it out. He was leaning towards my processor being too weak to run it anymore, but then had a sudden thought about my antivirus software. Of course, now I feel like an idiot as it is the most obvious thing.

I have a terrible time remembering to turn off Norton AV before starting up my game, and although I did disable it a number of times I would be willing to bet that the times I forgot to turn it off just happened to be the times that I was starting from a new save. The times I disabled it and loaded a previous save, it was crashing as my save had already been corrupted.

So, it seems that my antivirus software has been corrupting my save files. I tested it a bit last night, disabled the AV and started a new, clean save. Played a bit, saved, shut the game down and reloaded it, played some more, and so on. I think I saved and quit and reloaded four or five times and it continues to work. I moved my sim to Uni and that seems to work just fine as well.

Now I'm actually wondering if that might be what was messing with my ability to install the store content as well. Tonight I will do some more testing and see if I can load the store content back in and see if the game continues to function properly. And of course I feel completely ridiculous as I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure out where I'm going wrong and it was so simple all along.

What's funny is that even though that's one of the things that is always recommended to disable, the times I forgot to disable it I just assumed it would be fine because when I used to play it on Win XP I never disabled the AV and it always ran fine. I didn't consider that maybe something in my upgrade to Win 7 changed that so that I really do have to disable it for the game to work properly now.

I'll post one more update tomorrow after some more testing to make sure this actually solves it completely. I appreciate all your help and patience while I worked through this mess.

[Gabbryrose · Accepted solution]

So disabling the antivirus didn't completely fix it, as the next day it was back to crashing. A little digging around on the internet turned up a suggestion to install directx 9 and put the directx 9 switch on the shortcut that I use to launch the game, so I gave that a try. It has run beautifully since then. I have played almost every night this week with no crashing; everything is running smoothly even with all the graphics turned up.

Ford mentioned that this probably isn't what actually fixed it, as the dx9 should have already been installed in Win 7 and TS3 uses it by default, but somehow this seems to have done it. The only other thing that has changed since then was that I replaced my sound card, but that doesn't seem like something that would fix a crashing problem. (I was having some sound issues after installing Win 7)

Either way, this problem seems to be resolved by some combination of the dx9 switch, disabling the anti-virus, and replacing the sound card.

Thanks again for all your help working through resolving this!

[crinrict]

Great to hear.

Could you please accept a solution so people know that this is solved and what the solution was.

Thank you

(I'm not sure if you're able to do that cause your latest post shows your name in small letters while up till now it was a capital G and you're posts have gone down to 1. Did you change your name or something or is this a new issue with this site ?)

[Gabbryrose]

I was actually wondering that myself about the name change, as I noticed that it wasn't capitalized as well. Might be a hiccup in the site?

I marked the final solution. I hope that some of this can help someone else.