And, it seems, red assassin bugs. Problematic when you're working on that part of one of the quests.

I don't think it's related to pregnancy, as I had a male sim with this problem, way back when the game first launched. He got stuck in the animation for carrying an infant and would pop into that pose every ~15 seconds or so. The behavior lasted until the day he died, whether he was sleeping, eating, or whatever. I haven't seen it since, so I attributed it to some non-Awesome glitch--pretty much the only one I've ever had.

...6 months ago, I upgraded my video card to a Radeon X1900XTX with 512MB. I have 2 GB RAM, and an AMD FX-60. I now have white pools, and my PC runs the Sims like crap. Can't even run it in a window anymore. (Decimates Oblivion though...)

So anyway, maybe white pools are just a Radeon problem?

Maybe I'm just lucky? I have always had an nVidia card and I wouldn't switch for anything. ATM, I have the 6800 Ultra, never seen a blue screen, no artifacts and no crashing. I DO deliberately use ancient drivers--61.77.  I've never understood why the first advice in troubleshooting is to "update the drivers" when it seems like my old drivers are much more stable and shiny than the ones since 77.77. *shrug*

That's what happened to me. The debugger immediately sent me to the loading screen for the home lot; my sims were there as they should have been and I've not had any problems since.

...And it takes FOREVER. I spent hours "pass along"-ing only to find that the receiver had only gotten one step up farther up the ladder...

I've done it several times and it's worked fine with one exception that the lot debugger corrected instantly.


Have you got that global that went with Inge's apartment doors? That was causing a problem for me till I found it lurking in my skins folder and took it out. It's "securitypatch" or something like that.

Are you talking about options like "Sales/Hard Sell" and "Sales/Dazzle"? Those come with sales badges. The only way to gain badges is by repeating the interactions, unless you find a hack for it somewhere.  The only one that comes on the perks menu is "Manipulate" which I haven't pulled off successfully yet.

No cheating, except for one emergency use of "maxmotives" since my 3rd trimester pregnant sim was keeling over from starvation while "restocking".  This was accomplished this morning in about 3 hours, freshly "deleteall" neighborhood, first CAS sims I made day before yesterday. I was selling palm trees in my front yard.   




There's a lot more I want to experiment with, though. I closed that business down after the founder died and now her daughter is running a level 5 styling salon out of the garage.

FWIW, I've seen several professors parading around my home business this morning, no blue screen. It's an old neighborhood, but I just did a deleteall day before yesterday, and it's still constantly generating new NPCs. You could use the debug cheat, spawn the NPC creator and generate all NPCs that way instead of letting the game generate them as it needs 'em. See if the problem persists.


ZZ, don't be afraid to install it--it's fantastic and very complex. I've not had any major bugs on my end, just ignorance. Like when I forgot to move my custom CAS over to the new folder and spent an hour trying to figure out why my game was crashing when I tried to access CAS...

If this is the one I encountered where the "owners" get in their car and "leave" the lot but the game fails to transition back to their home lot and save/return to neighborhood is grayed out, the Debugger fixes this quite nicely. "Reenable controls" immediately sent it to the load screen and then to the home lot.



Yeah, and it seems that you have to do this every time you add something to sell, unless you are just "restocking".

Ain't that the truth. I've got the 6800 Ultra AGP and I fight the good fight against the overheating monster regularly.  The slightest dust buildup on my (turbo) fans and I've got to air the case.

I use this little benchmark stability test for my video card: http://freestone-group.com/video-card-stability-test.htm

My card benchmarks well into the 1700 range. What they list for the  7800 GTX is 1358-2225. *shrug* I'm quite happy with this until I ditch this motherboard for an SLI setup. 

Yep. I  even tried the locktiles cheat and it also does not work to place the cover on the box. Bah.

Ahh, that's what tax returns are for! The EB guy was wishing he made commission the night my husband and I went in there to prepay for all the games we want that are coming out before August...and Yuffie will be back in April! (At least, if they don't push the release date AGAIN.  )

I just deliberately tried that, and for me it works fine, so far at least. Baaaaah! I just filled my yearly quota of BBS reading. Thank you! 

Our EB always gets them on the street date (which is NOT the ship date that you see in the online stores--it's almost always Wednesday). I just wind up having to wait for them to get their UPS shipment sometime before noon.
I'm installing now--sitting here with the "Please Wait" that I remember took something like 20 minutes with NL to finish whatever it is doing.


Next EP? Nope. Ad for "Family Fun Pack" available in April, much like the Holiday pack.

"Decorate kids' bedrooms with complete Fantasy and Underwater-themed sets.
Redesign the family room with upscale Nautical furnishings
Dress your Sims' children in adventurous costumes or clothe the whole family in matching outfits for a group outing.
Ge in on all the family fun with over 60 new itmes including castle beds, sun dresses, tropical wall-hangings, and more!"


Ahem. Upscale NAUTICAL furnishings? Adventurous costumes?? You mean their clothing choices to date were not adventurous enough? *sigh*

I have never regretted my Alienware. Their tech support is fantastic. The problem with it is that we bought it in 2004. At the time it was friggin awesome, and now even after replacing lots of components--like the GeForce FX 5600 we replaced with the 6800 Ultra--it still feels old and clunky. Of course we replaced the damn (expensive) AGP card right before the PCI-E first got big, or I'd have waited and replaced the motherboard THEN.  It's also got a heat problem we have managed to stave off so far by replacing the fans with (extremely loud) turbo ones.


I used to feel like I knew what I wanted in my computer, and now the technology has advanced until I am waaay out of my league. Which is why I ask for advice here, 'cause I know no one here will tell me I can download a new video card if I just Google it. 

Seems like it's retroactive, too. I clicked on it with a sim that had already been "upgraded" months ago, and he got the option to upgrade/select a major. 

Have you tried 2Jeff's aquarium fix?  http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2881.0

...or did you just want Maxis to fix it? 

I didn't see a noticeable difference, and I went from 4 256MB sticks of generic RAM Alienware put in my case to 2 1GB sticks of Corsair XMS. *shrug*


I'm curious about the dual-core thing too; my husband and I have been hashing about ripping apart our "old" Alienware and building an Athlon with SLI capability. Think it is worthwhile for us to upgrade sooner, or should we wait for the technology to improve a little more?  Right now we're running a P4 3.0 Ghz with 2 GB of the XMS, an nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, and an ancient SB Audigy. We've thrown about 4 turbo fans in there too, since we've been battling the overheating monster for about 6 months now. It's really pissing me off--the damn thing is LOUD now.


Edit: Oh, look, my question about equivalency was answered before I posted. 

Crap in a HAT, is that why mine aren't working? I thought I was just totally stupid and wasn't understanding. That and the fact that I have to restart SimPe after every skin since it throws me "out of memory" errors--I have frigging 2GB--if I don't.

Three clicks, no matter how many sims2pack files you have.  Just move your house files somewhere else when you use this, or it will dump all that custom content out loose. Pain in the wazoo.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=37577

Yup me too. The painting not only won't sit on the wall, it freezes time. 

Holy flurkin shnit.  And here I was thinking that I urgently need to prune my 1.8 GB, 10000 files.  It would drive me insane to have that much stuff to sort through! Good luck to you, whatever you decide to do with all that. (I recommend the delete key.. )

Sims 1 skins had bmp cmx and skn. *Sigh* Thank God I no longer have to try to pin down a rogue missing piece of a skin file. Woot.