More Awesome Than You!

Over the weekend I created a clothing collection in CAS and added about a half a dozen or so outfits to it. But after a certain point, I got the dreaded "This application has crashed. This application will terminate." message when trying to add another outfit. I first thought maybe the dress I was trying to add was corrupted, so when I went back into the game I deleted it, but it happened again with a different dress. I haven't had any problems with the game after that and everything else in CAS was fine. As I said I only had maybe 6 or 7 items in the collection when it started to crash, so I doubt it was any max limit of items. And those several items went happily into the collection with nary a peep from the game.

Any suggestions/fixes/rocks to throw at my game?

Here's a nice sharp rock to bash in your tower's sides.  ;D

When I first started playing S2, my laptop computer had the minimum rec of 32Mb Ram - it crashed everytime I used Build Mode.  I moved the game to my desktop which had 64Mb and it was marginally better.  I now have 128.

Have you tried upping your virtual memory settings and page file size?  I have mine now set at the maximum for my system which is 1024.5 with Virtual Mem Total of 2047.9 and Pagefile Total of 4096.0

You may want to try checking/adjusting your settings.  I also reboot my computer after using Body Shop, HomeCrafter and SimPE just to flush the memory before diving into the game.

Hope this helps

do you mean video memory there, sockmonkey?

The minimum RAM requirement for TS2 is 256M - and I think you'd have to be mad to run at that level anyway!

No, it's the Virtual Memory and Page file (swapping) settings under the Advanced tab in System Properties on the hard drive.

Right-Click on 'My Computer' --> Properties --> Advanced and it's the top button in the box called Performance.

Okay, I've got 384 for paging, recommended being around 1500. Guess I should bump that up, I do often get messages about virtual memory being low when I close the game and sometimes even Bodyshop. I always think about rebooting but usually am too lazy :P Guess I need to start doing that.

Definitely; MS recommends 1.5x system memory if you're going to set it yourself, and more experts think that's too low and recommend setting it to at least 2x system memory. 

I'm definately going to up the virtual memory, in fact my husband suggested a second hard drive for it, heh :) I'm not sure that's actually the cause here though...it makes sense to me, but I tried it again just now immediately after booting up the machine and it crashed again adding the first item to a new collection. :P

That's what my husband suggested.  So when I got a larger hard drive, I kept the old one installed to handle some of those tasks where the computer might require extra temporary space.  I use it for back-ups, too.

Also note that TS2 has a minimum requirement of 256 MBs of RAM, but that Windoze will take up half of your RAM, so that you will need twice as much in your actual computer, because Windoze takes up half of it.

That's true, especially if you use Outlook, it is quite the memory sponge and I have 1024 Mb.  I try and make a point to reboot if I have used Outlook or Excel at any time to help reduce this - it seems like the more memory you have the more Windows will waste.

You should try out the Cacheman utility at http://www.outertech.com/index.php?_charisma_page=index.  It'll tune your system, and sits in the background cleaning up memory when programs like Outlook leave .dlls loaded when they exit.  Saves having to reboot to get the memory back.  I've used it for years and never had a problem with it.

Oh I'll have to check out that program. I don't use Outlook but that could be handy anyway.

I do think virtual memory was the problem after all...I manually upped it and it helped (but started crashing again anyway). Yesterday  my husband installed an old hard drive into my box so now I have 3 gig dedicated swap space. Hopefully that will pick things up and help with clothing collections. CAS must eat up virtual memory like a teenager eats french fries :P

I think Bodyshop is worse for that than the actual game, I was never able to run it, so I just lost interest.

Have you got the latest DirectX?

And do you use a program like Window Washer to clear out all your caches, or a Registry Cleaner to keep your registry in good shape?  Defrag on a regular basis, long before windows tells you to?  Get rid of all the unneccessary .bak files that simPE creates?  Buy your computer a birthday gift?.....