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sarah9900
23rd May 2007, 04:01 AM
So, I have TONS of graphics errors. First off I'll give my specs...

HP Pavilion zd8000
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz, 2.79GHz
2.00 GB of RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon X600 (128MB)
Driver Version 6.14.0010.6530
Home XP, Service Pack 2
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

I have all Eps and stuff packs, but my problems started about 3-4 weeks after playing Pets. I've had BSOD's, the hourglass/blue screen, objects and graphics that go missing and turn black. I had red flashing walls for a while, but I haven't had those since I reinstalled drivers.

At the height of my frustration, I decided to reinstall Sims, but I was playing a legacy family (3 sims), so I packaged them before reinstalling. With the reinstalled Sims 2, I could play for about an hour before it would crash ("The application had crashed. It will now terminate.") Then other times it would only last 5-10 minutes before the BSOD rebooted my comp. I was only playing the legacy family that I'd packaged earlier and at first I thought it was the lot that they were in, but moving them didn't help. I tried using the useshaders false cheat since I shared so many of the Nvidia card symptoms, didn't work. My card isn't over heating, my memory's fine, I have plenty of hard drive space...I just can't figure out what's wrong.

I went through the tutorial for finding broken files (custom content vs. actual game files) and when I took all the custom content out it worked without problems and YET going though my downloads in sections did not reproduce the problem! I put my downloads folder (newly organized) back in it worked fine, until a few days later. And if you want even more symptoms...since installing Celebrations, sometimes Season's won't run, no message or anything, it just doesn't open. I uninstall and reinstall Celebrations and its fine again. My last issue rarely happens, but sometimes when the game crashes ("The application has crashed...") it will exit Sims, go to the desktop and when I try and run Seasons again (without rebooting) it has a "Failed to find any DirectX 9.0c compatible graphics adapters..." error message that comes up, but rebooting usually solves this problem.

What really irks me is that I played for 2-3 months before any of these issues arose, and all of a sudden its error central.

I'm at my wits end :( , please help

JLonier
23rd May 2007, 11:17 AM
I googled the error you mentioned and found this page (http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-40424-The-Sims-2-failed-to-find-any-DirectX-90c-compatible-graphics-adapters.html) where someone was having the exact same problem as you but with an Nvidia.

They resolved it by uninstalling the old drivers and then re-installing with the new ones.

sarah9900
27th May 2007, 02:08 AM
Update:

Well, I reinstalled the latest drivers and now I can run the game for about 2 hours. I get a lot more blue screen/hourglasses and it will still crash after 2 hours ("The application has crashed..."), but at least I can play. The game still has black/missing graphics at times, but the frequency has diminished. I have no idea what changed but I'm crossing my fingers and hope that the game doesn't revert to its unplayable ways.

julianarosalia
27th May 2007, 04:20 PM
Since you're playing on a laptop, you need to be careful of overheating as well. I'd monitor the temperature of the CPU and video card. Also get a cooling pad, newegg.com (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2030080319+1276817102&name=Cooler) carries them for a reasonable price.

sarah9900
29th May 2007, 01:42 AM
Way ahead of you on the overheating issue. I actually thought that was the problem at first, since my computer essentially has desktop processor in a laptop. I have a cooling pad and I've done testing to make sure it wasn't overheating, but alas it is not the issue. Thanks though! :-)

sarah9900
29th May 2007, 08:51 PM
I'm wondering if the Celebrations Stuff pack could be the issue...

I have a new symptom, after being able to run the game multiple times without bsods/reboots (I wanna say about 10 times?) I tried to execute the application and I got an error message with nothing in it. There was just a blank box and an OK button. Rebooting didn't help (I got the same error) so I uninstalled and reinstalled Celebrations and now it's able to run again. I can't completely uninstall Celebrations because I've been playing a legacy family and the backed up Seasons files go back to generation 2 and I'm currently on gen 7. Has anyone else been having errors with the Celebrations pack? Arg.