EDIT: I posted another thread at the SimCity forum. Thanks soulfire!

Hello all. I know this forum isn't really for SimCity games, but I thought it would be best to place it in Sims1 forum, since it isn't really a newer Sims game (or a Sims game at all... but bear with me).

I'm running SimCity 4 Deluxe on my Windows 7 with Intel i5 processor (4 cores).

The game is so old, that it doesn't know how to respond to being handled by four processors. That's why the game crashes every 15 minutes to two hours (how long I have managed to keep it running this way). Luckily, I've found what the problem was. It was just a matter of telling the system to allow only one processor core to handle the game. (I've done it by placing -CPUCount:1 at the end of the shortcut target.)

I started the game again, and it was all fine. Woke up the next day and continued playing, everything was perfect (though I was a little worried if the game would crash again or not, so I've been saving the game every 20 minutes).

I decided to have some lunch, so I minimized the game by pressing the Windows button on my keyboard. I do that with every game I play.

Usually, Sims2, Sims3 or SimsCS sits quietly in the background, causing no lag at all while I'm using other apps, and they barely use any processors. But unfortunately, that wasn't the case with SC4.

I came back to my room to play the game again, but I smelled smoke. Oh my god. I was so fucking scared... then I noticed my laptop's fan is going crazy!! I checked my task manager to see what's causing the issue... only one of my CPU cores (the one that was handling SC4) was at 100% (but it would run even higher I believe, if it had space).

I shut down SC4, turned off and unplugged the laptop, and let it sit for awhile.

The next day (I haven't turned my computer on ever since), I tried switching which core was handling SC4 - when the game launched, I opened task manager and under Afinity (or something like that - my system is on Croatian) instead of CPU0 I checked CPU1. I played for awhile (tried to recreate what I made yesterday), minimized the game and turned on task manager.

The CPU1 usage was going up... and up... and up... and up...

Basically, SimCity 4 is frying my processors. Does anyone know why, and how I can stop that?

(While the game was assigned to all four processor cores, all four of them were handling the game nicely (little to no activity), but the game would crash after time.)

Certain games crash if the pc used to run them is "too powerful".
Also this would be better in the SimCity section... Just scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.

Um... where exactly? I can't find anything that says SimCity here. It could be poking me in my eyes though.

I think there's a Sim City section under "other games".

It's under "Greater Gaming World"