That's quite passe, actually. Don't you remember these? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1pduXLMkZw - oh - silly me, Jeromy was too young.

Process of elimination. You're half way there.

It sounds to me as if the wrong file is in one of the game folders - maybe installed in the wrong place in error. You need to completely uninstall your game, making sure you get rid of any files left in the game folders on the E drive after uninstallation.

If you still get the error with a CLEAN freshly installed game, then you have a problem.

The caches referred to when folks tell you to 'clear your caches' are normally in your My Documents folder, being

CASPartCache, compositorCache, scriptCache, and simcompositorCache, and since you removed out your whole usergame from your My Documents, the offending file(s) must be somewhere in your game files (which in your case are on E).

Is there any way in AM to turn off teen mood swing notifications? They are completely unrelated to what is happening in the game and simply annoying.

EG teen in house alone - parents off on one of those silly entrapment-weekends - he has no intention of throwing a teen party - and he gets a mood swing message - the whole household is in uproar because of it, it says. Gah! WHAT whole household?

This is assuming I HAVE $50 to donate. Which I don't. You might find a better candidate.

That's actually an outfit I wear occasionally, in Second Life... I'll sell you a pair for $50.

Did it occur to anyone that a Sims stove could be filled with something other than wood but just as renewable - like Sims' bones, for instance? Actually MORE renewable than trees as in our Sims games they can't go out and chop down a tree for firewood... 

I spent the day downloading a load of Store stuff from 4shared... I have all the EPs and stuff packs not including Generations, am patched up to date, and still am getting an error message on many of the Sims3Pack dls saying "Installation failed. Please make sure your game has the latest Software Updates and try again. Since I HAVE the latest updates and patches, what am I doing wrong?

I had the same issues with the little houses. Most of my Sims didn't stay in those houses for long, they were too short of sleep - or bathroom deprived, unless I watched them carefully all the time.

I do like the large farm-like lots from the outskirts and am still using some of those, and several trailers LOL. I wonder if my problems could have been routing issues. Even though I have moved most of the Sims out of that Hood, I still pop back now and then, and it still tends to crash (CTD) for no apparent reason. So I don't know if it is too many Sims there.

A new version would be great. I'm looking forward to Pets too maybe paddocks too, for horses?

It does appear that people who are having issues with the language get more airtime, at least of the positive thought, than people who ask what appear to be on-topic questions - this is, after all, a board about Sims 3, is it not?

But as I said, I do not pretend to understand the "logic" of this place.

Strangely enough I had used the search quite a lot. But thanks to a couple of members here, I now know the secret and am putting it here in case others need it. It is at the very obvious (to some)  location  http://beta.moreawesomethanyou.com/ts3/test/ and I don't actually see how I was expected to know that. I've never pretended to understand the logic of this board or its denizens, but I do happen to think the software here is the best. So BAH!

Polite? Maybe. Prompt? Yes. Helpful? No.

Well I fail the IQ test too because in spite of prolonged searching I can't find a download for the purported and very secret "test version".
Unsure if this is even the correct version as I do NOT have Generations - but am all patched up. Would be grateful for relatively polite suggestions.

I am getting this too. In my case it takes various forms - sometimes it seems to begin with a car journey and the sound is similar to that of driving. But it goes on for Sim hours, LONG after the Sim has arrived wherever, or I have even switched away from that Sim and the sound continues. It can stop suddenly or restart, as described above, at FULL volume, which is quite unpleasant. At other times there are the same ongoing television and radio noises as described, even with all electronics on the Lot switched off; at yet other times it seems to be simply random game sounds including Sim toddlers laughing, Sims talking, music.... It is really making the game virtually unplayable, at least with sound on.

As poster above, I have a good computer built by ditto. 8Gigs RAM, AMD Phenom quad-core chip, masses of HD space and degfragged regularly. I shut down most processes when loading Sims 3, except the antivirus and Firefox.

This sounds interesting. I would like to try it.

I'd second the starter houses - I love to build but would much rather build for my Sims once they have made a little money and got established in a career (and developed a personality!)

Lots of spawners please. large is definitely good. I was playing Bay City, which is beautiful, but I ran out of building space because although it was not marked off with no-go terrain paint, a lot of the empty countryside-ish land was too hilly to build on; quite unrealistically lumpy. If I WANT open countryside with nobbut scattered farms, fair enough, but if my town wants to expand I want that possibility open to me too.

Saved files for a world which is already in play are fine - I got the world JFade made that way, once I knew how to install it, it worked pretty well (I suspect the problems I later had with it were caused by mods or CC I had installed, not the fault of the world) and I DO like the idea of families who already have some story, so long as there is room for me to add my Sims and work them into the stories.

Easter Eggs are always fun, specially at this time of the year!

I played it quite intensively for weeks with the Sims you put in and some more I added. It's failing though; I assumed it was simply too many Sims being played at once. So I am slowly moving out some of the Sims to other Worlds. Did enjoy this one though.

What a lovely idea. I prefer to fill a Hood with my own Sims, but I can see the reasoning for the extra NPCs in workplaces. It does seem a little odd when there is only 1 other person working as a <insert career here>.
I like BIG Hoods. Lots of space; I am playing Bay City right now. I like enough space to be able to add extra lots, if only so I can place some of the poorer families in shacks.
I wonder if a shanty-town idea might work? I saw some TINY Lots yesterday but I can't remember where.
Would agree with the play-able and play-tested requirement for Lots. While I like to build myself, sometimes I just want to immerse myself and PLAY - and that kind of lot breaks the immersion completely.
I think the celebrity (Anderson Cooper? whodat?) idea may not be not such a good one. If I want RL people in the Hood, I tend to search for a good likeness or make one and add them myself. (Guess who had about 8 versions of David Duchovny for S2 and STILL couldn't find one that looked like him...)

If it helps any - I had similar problems - and reinstalled computer completely to a XP 64 bit system.
Installing to the default location is probably a good idea, or so I have been told. So that is C:\Program Files (x86)
One thing someone said, and worked for me on the old 32 bit system for a while, was - make sure the AntiVirus is switched OFF before installing the graphics drivers.
The other thing is that I have NOT been able to get my No-CD hack (even freshly downloaded) to run at ALL, EVER, on the Win 64 bit system. Game works perfectly (touch wood) from the disk. So I have had, in the end, to choose Securom over not playing ANY Sims 2. Does your game work from the disk?

I speak Internet, obviously that isn't what is spoken hereabouts. I already said sorry for being a foreigner. Odd thing about MATY, everyone here has time to read through many many pages; not always an attractive option specially when a lot of it is insults. Not scarey, but silly and a little sad.

Tarlia I do appreciate your making a new thread. Much easier. And no you aren't a scary MATYer. there are plenty of those. And your Mega-Hood is working beautifully. I'm glad you did plug it.

Haifen, Urinalz? name of a mountain? Check Google Earth, I think you spelled it wrong. Mind you, you obviously don't see very well - are you aware that is a sheep on your lap?

I do appreciate the work that has gone into these Hoods, and specially Tarlia... the thing is, I would never have found your LJ without the link from here. And it was not clear (at least to me, but then I must speak a foreign language as well) from the discussion that the OP one was broken. At least it is clear now to anyone reading here after me, IF they read through this whole 8 pages... 

Well thanks anyhow, Tarlia, your mega-hood is working fine for me. Mixreality's one was indeed crashing for me, not on EVERY Lot, but about one in every 2 with little rhyme or reason as to which. In fact it could crash on a Lot I had already played, not only a "new-to-play-this install" one, where you might expect there to be more wear and tear. Odd thing was, on the crashing lots, it was ALWAYS as the family was loading, when there are four squares lit up on the loading screen. At that point it would just hang eternally or simply crash - sometimes it locked up computer to the point of having to do a switch-off restart, but mostly just an error message that this application has crashed...
And yes, I think it would help if you were to make a new thread.... or just write in BIG LETTERS for the forum illiterates like me who expect things to be spelled out and are not used to trolling all the way through looong threads as MATY seems to expect.

I like this forum, there are so many clever folks here - but it seems to do things very differently from the rest of the Interwebs. (NOT a complaint, but a comment - maybe some here should be a leeetle more tolerant toward those of us used to the other style.)

The one referenced in the first post here - because it is not clear which one to use, I assumed that was the right one... are you now telling me that is known not to work cos I coulda saved myself a great deal of frustration if I'd known... I did read right through the thread though.

Yours works? hmmm... do I want to start yet again? (of course I do - downloading )

I am grateful for all the work folk are doing on this but a bit more clarity for us poor downloaders might help....

Spent the last week RL playing with this - but it's broken. Pity, it's a great idea, but maybe just too complicated to be properly implemented? There seem to be several versions out there.

Going back to playing with one of the set Hoods... at least there are Sims there with stories, that have lots that do not crash as soon as I load them. So tired of crashing. And I've tried everything, downloads, hacks removed, it has to be the megahood itself.

Lovely! My Sims will love this, thank you!

Thank you, GTA Champion, I changed my resource.cfg so it looks like that, made subfolder and now for some testing.

Thank you Jordi. I looked at the Resource.cfg files, didn't move them. Moved all my packages into the root folder Mods\Packages - so they aren't so easy to sort but at least both AM and the computer work fine now. Many thanks to all for advice. See, it doesn't hurt to be moderately nice to people occasionally.