Screen goes black and Windows locks up

[FlamingoKicker]

It's looking promising.  I replaced  my old Radeon with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970.  Still checking out my programs to see which ones are running and which aren't (my backup software for some reason now isn't working properly.  I guess it's always something.  But I did restore my Sims back to a time when I knew it was working correctly so I should be back in business except for some reason I can't get my Saved Files to show up properly so I may just have to forget about them and start creating families new and more forward).

If it doesn't crash to black screen I can live with losing my families.

[FlamingoKicker · Accepted solution]

Wow!  I can't believe all it took was replacing my graphics card and all my system problems went away.  My game is playing flawlessly.  I suspect my old Radeon card just died (or was on the way).  When we took it out it was covered in a layer of dust, cat hair, ash and general grime from a decade of not being cleaned and the fan on it hadn't worked in years.  That can't be good.  Anyway,   played the game for three years with no problems whatsoever.  I wish I knew how to recover my saved files and families from my backup drive.  I'm happy I can still create brand new families anyway so I guess I can live without my old families (most of whom I hadn't played in years anyway).  Get to see all those default families young again.  Well,  thanks again for all your help and suggestions.

[puzzlezaddict]

@FlamingoKicker  I'm really glad to hear the game is working again.  Sometimes hardware just dies, or at least dies enough that it can't handle a heavy load.  Whether the cause was the dust and grime or some mechanical failure is hard to say, but it sounds like you don't really want to meticulously clean the old card just to find out.  (I wouldn't either.)

I don't know what's up with your backup drive, but any content you've saved can be moved to the proper location in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4, and the game should read it.

[FlamingoKicker]

The backup drive worked after I Googled the problem and someone suggested I make sure to turn off my Anti-Virus programs, cleaned my caches and temp files and then    running the backup software again and of course that worked.  Scary having no anti-virus protection on though or why developers can't make sure these things don't happen.