EA/Maxis has found the Nvidia problem!
FourCats:
For those who get either the random DOS "blue screen of death" crash, the "nv4_disp" infinite loop message, or unexplainable crashes to an in-game blue screen lockup with skipping audio, this is for you.
This latest news on the "nVidia crash" has a short version and a long version.
The short version: Make sure your anti-virus program(s) are disabled/turned off before playing The Sims 2. Especially those who have any Norton product installed. Games and Anti-Virus programs both like using a large amount of your system's paged memory. Even if your game did not crash you would probably see a reduction in your performance. For some reason when The Sims 2 is running with Norton Internet Security, the Anti-Virus is not releasing some of the memory which eventually leads to the system running out of memory.
The long version: Those of you who have been following this story will know that after weeks of research and testing, we could not reproduce this crash internally, even using some of the exact same models of video cards that were being reported as failing by our customers.
After consulting with a customer who had experienced the crash with a brand new system purchased from Dell, we bought ourselves the exact same system from Dell and immediately saw the crash for the first time.
We named this PC "Crashy".
As the error messages from the crash indicated the crash was occurring in the nVidia driver, we sent Crashy to nVidia for them to research the problem. After researching the problem for several months, nVidia concluded that the fault lay with our game, that the game was "leaking kernel memory" and that memory leak would eventually cause the PC to crash. How long the crash took to occur would be different for each individual gamer, as it is dependent on the specs of their PC. More RAM or more video card memory would delay the crash, or perhaps prevent it entirely.
When we got Crashy back from nVidia recently, we reformatted the PC's hard drive to start fresh in an attempt to isolate where and how kernel memory would be leaking from the game when we had not detected such a leak in any pre-release game testing.
Once we installed The Sims 2 and all the EP's back onto Crashy after the reformat, once playing the game, the crashing stopped occurring entirely!
This was very discouraging, as we can not fix a crash that we can not reproduce, and now it seemed we were back to Square One.
But upon further review, we realized that Crashy had come from Dell pre-installed with Norton AntiVirus, and when we first tried Crashy we had not been following our own Customer Support instructions about shutting off the AntiVirus before playing the game. The re-format had uninstalled the Norton from the machine, so now it was not running at all while playing.
Looking into Norton a bit on the Internet and with consultations with both nVidia and Microsoft, we learned that Norton has been suspected of leaking kernel memory while running, and this in combination with a program like The Sims 2 that utilizes kernel memory could be a fatal combination for a PC.
While we do not want to throw the Norton product under the bus, we have not been able to reproduce the crash since removing it. The Norton product is commonly bundled for free and pre-installed with off-the-rack PC's that many of our players purchase, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this could be the cause of this crash for these players.
So for those of you who are experiencing a crash, we ask that you turn off/disable/shut down your anti-virus program, Norton or otherwise, before starting the game. Report back to us what happens in the Technical Help Forum with an easily identifiable subject to your post so we will see it. Thank you, and we hope this works for you!
~MaxoidShannon
Yeah, right. Like I'm going to do that. My virus scanner and firewall are all-in-one. So I disable that to play my game, and let you come into my computer through my always on internet connection? I don't think so.
Tigerlilley:
They're always said disable your antivirus/firewall.
Theres a simple solution Fourcats. Don't Sim and Net.
Otherwise get rid of crappy Norton.
FourCats:
norton isn't our firewall and anti virus. humm. don't sim and net, that would require a lot of self-control.
Lyra:
I want to say that people running Norton have it coming to them anyway. There's no excuse to have that bloater on your system when there are so many free and effective firewalls/anti-virus programs.
But yeah. Saying that you should turn off your anti-virus before playing is a little bit cheeky. More than a little bit. Why not just fix that memory leak of yours?
Aggie:
Fourcats, if that fixes the crashing problem, I don't think people are going to complain. Simply disable your Anti-Virus and your connection to the internet.
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