I don't know. I don't think the problem I am having is related to anything in the game, like overcrowding in public places, bad CC, or anything like that. It simply won't run. It does the same crash every time. It ran fine for quite some time in Windows 7. At that time I had the whole thing installed: Base+All EPs+Stuff Packs+CC. Ran like a charm. Then one day kablooey, it just stopped functioning and would crash my computer every time. I uninstalled it all and reinstalled it all, minus the CC. Same thing happened. Then I wiped the drive, including Windows 7, reinstalled it, then installed JUST THE BASE GAME and it still happens. This is just watching the default neighborhood zoom in, choosing a family, and going into their house - BLAMMO. Black screen crash. Have to press the button to get computer back on.

I feel that something in the way that Windows 7 was updated screwed the whole thing up.

And as far as it being a pain in the butt to reinstall all this? HA! I'm actually on a mac, running Windows off of Boot Camp. I'm also downgrading my Mac OS from Lion to Snow Leopard concurrently with this entire project. I'm getting a new hard drive and think I'm just going to ditch the buggy OS's for the time being. On Lion, my Sims 3 won't run worth a crap, either.

At this point I would have to reinstall the Sims 2 just to test to see if Liv's solution would work and right now I think I'm pretty committed to this course of action. I really can't think of any reason why I need Windows 7.

My game almost never crashes, so since it isn´t a problem for me I havn´t really payed much attention to what might have caused it the few times it has happend. However; today I actually had a crash. It was caused by me cloning the appearance of a pregnant sim, and it crashed my game when I tried to enter CAS and it also crashed Body Shop. So this time it wasn´t caused by some bad CC, but by my game´s inability to correctly clone that sim´s appearance (and I think it was because the sim in question was pregnant).

When you say you cloned her, I'm assuming you mean you extracted her with SimPE? If so, did you rename the file? I extracted a few sims once who crashed everything and that turned out to be the problem.

It was actually a guy . Yes, I cloned him in SimPE (together with many other sims) since I´m in the process of recreating my custom ´hood. All other sims were okay to clone, except for this one. I finally solved it by cloning him from an earlier back-up of that ´hood, where he wasn´t pregnant.

It shouldn't be down to the sim being pregnant. I cloned Pascal Curious while he was pregnant, and all that happened was that the clone wasn't pregnant.

This thread jinxed me LOL. I knew after posting here I was gonna have an issue and I did. I had Faith Goodie changing her appearance and it crashed. Of course this has happened before when I've had over a gig of hair installed and only occurs with elders. Guess having to shift through all those unnecessary hairs crashes it. Of course if I was proactive in this i would rebin the hairs so there was only 1 grey per 4 colors, but meh it's getting nice out and I like being distracted by shiny things outdoors.

It´s of course quite possible that there were other reasons to why he crashed the game. But it was at least the only explanation I could see to why only he, and no one else, caused the game to crash.

UPDATE: I finally got it to not crash by installing DirectX 9 and/or running in Windows 98/ME compatibility mode. I'm not sure which one did the trick because I did both at the same time, but after making these two modifications I was able to keep the base game running for 30 minutes without problems. Further testing may be required but perhaps this means I won't have to go back to XP after all. *fingers crossed*

UPDATE 2: It didn't work again. After the first 30 minutes I went back and tried again. This time I actually patched it, which I had not done previously. As soon as my sim left home and went to a community lot it crashed. Again, I don't think this is a resource problem, as my computer is very new and has 8GB of ram, good video card, etc. Plus this is just the base game. I am not going to post anymore updates, but felt I should this once in case anyone else who read it thought it might work. Don't waste your time.

Out of curiosity, I installed it on my ancient HP that I've had for nearly 10 years. It has Server 2003 on it. Base game runs fine. A little choppy in the community areas but otherwise no problems. I've had it running for several hours now. I will be interested to see it with Server 2003 on my faster new computer.

Weird you're having so many problems. I run Sims 2 (All expansion and stuff packs) on my Win 7 laptop just fine. Some of that crashing probably was because you didn't have DirectX 9 installed. Sims 2 requires it.

Well, now I do and it's still crashing. I know it's weird. There are plenty of people for whom Win 7 is working fine. I just don't happen to be one of them. I'm really not upset by downgrading the OS, though. I have a feeling some of the other games I want to play are going to have similar issues (Civilization 4, Sim City 3000). If I want to play modern games I'll just get the Mac version and play it on that side. But lately I have been very disappointed in modern games. They just don't seem to have the "engrossingness" of older games to me.

lucky_d, if you install on Win 7 make sure you don't install it to the default location. Instead install to a custom location, for example C:\ Games. This will prevent Windows from interfering with UAC.

Or kill UAC--turn it off I mean. I would've thrown my laptop through the window if I left it on.
I've had crashes from overheating from generating too many icons at one time. If I delete the thumbnails or install too much cc all at once (like the last time I reinstalled my OS and put all my downloads back in), my little laptop gets too hot, even though I have the fan running. The solution is just to wait a bit between tabbing over and don't try to get it all done with at once: buy a tv, play five minutes, buy a bookcase, play five minutes, etc.

Why ever would you turn UAC off? It's one of the main security features of Vista/ Win 7 and makes them much safer. You just have to stop thinking like an XP user- don't install programs to the UAC protected locations, and don't expect to have unlimited admin access. You have to do a little thinking before installing programs, that's all. I use Win 7 with UAC protection and can run Sims 1, 2 and 3 with no issues, and certainly no crashing. Older programs which have user data saved to the install location are no problem as long as you don't install to Program Files.

Because I do expect to have admin access. I do a lot with this computer--and fussing with permissions drives me more nuts than filing taxes. NoScript is the limit of my tolerance. Microsoft programs generally drive me nuts, and the only reason I haven't switched to a Linux OS is that I can't run all my programs on one. If I wanted a Mac, I would've bought a Mac, so Microsoft should stop trying to emulate Apple programing.

You don't need to fuss with permissions, you just need to install to a non-system location and then click the button for admin access. If you turn off UAC you may as well just go back to XP.

Anyway, I'm dragging it off topic a bit, so I apologise!

UAC is a pain in the ass and the first thing I do after installing my OP is turn that f'er right off. It is so /tedious/.

You obviously don't understand what UAC does, and why turning it off is a bad idea.
http://www.7tutorials.com/uac-why-y...ver-turn-it-off

This explains it well, too:
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=317697

Perhaps we should have a separate UAC topic?
As for why I don't go back to XP, XP doesn't work as well with dual core processors. My computer shipped with Vista, we put XP on immediately, and I stayed with XP until it was apparent that 7 was a stable platform. My computer's faster under 7 than XP. Otherwise, yeah, I'd have stayed with XP.
Your second link talks a lot about multi-user systems, which is an entirely different thing. Yes, my oldest plays sims 2 occasionally, on my system, but he's not allowed to do anything else on it. I enforce this the old-fashioned way, by watching him. Nothing quite like having Mom looking over your shoulder to keep you behaving.

I understand perfectly what it does. I am very computer literate. Turning it off means I do not want the feature, not that I do not understand the feature.

But, I do agree that if one does not understand UAC (or any OS feature), one should not mess about with it - or educate oneself before so doing.

But in an attempt to stay on topic as well, I....er...thinking crashing is BAD! Very bad! I vote no in 2012 against Sims 2 game crashing!

:-)

I asked my husband about the UAC and if that could be the problem with my game crashing. He is a network administrator and says that he disabled it when he reinstalled Win7 on my computer, and that at his work they don't use it there either for all the trouble it causes. They have other programs that handle the security issues. Just out of curiosity I installed it to another location anyway to see if that helped. It didn't Still got crash to the desktop after about 3 minutes of play. Anyway, I just wanted to say that's not the cause of my crashes. I wish it was!

Hey I'm curious. For those of you who have it actually working on Win7... are you using the original 4-disc installer CDs or some newer version? I ran across something that said the original 4-discs may be the problem.

I am using the original 4 discs.

Have you vacuumed the computer lately?
I have double deluxe with all expansions plus M&G. So I run off of M&G. Do you have 7 in 32bit or 64bit? Mine is 32bit. There's a couple threads over on MATY in the podium on the subject that might be of use.

Ha! Funny you should mention that. We installed ram last week and we didn't have any canned air so my hubby made me get out the vacuum cleaner and vacuum it. Not sure if that's what you meant! LOL

Mine is 64 bit. What is MATY?

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/ Tend to be a bit snarky, but often have more technical stuff then MTS does. You don't have to register to read stuff, and it's Pescado's site, who makes a lot of hacks to stop your game from self corrupting.