No NVidia help files, Seasons won't run. What is going on?

[Lorelei]

I'm one of those unfortunate souls with a buggy NVidia card. It looks great when it works, but it is prone to crapping out when I use the curved arrows to swoosh merrily around Simworld. Tired of Turquoise Screenie of Game Coma and Everspinning Hourglass.

I'm DL'ing Driver Cleaner 3.3 (http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Driver-Cleaner-Download-6505.html if you want / need it, too) and think I've found a good driver, but haven't done this before and am nervous that I'll bork my computer. I may have to actually wait to DL the driver when I'm on a T1 rather than dial-up, it is probably several M.

The NVidia card is a GeForce Go 7600 GT with video BIOS 5.73.22.25.05, IRQ 16, Bus PC Express x16, mem 356M, Forceware version 84.57.

OS is XP service pack 2.

What's worrisome is that the display setting dll seem to be configured for MS2K. ("Compatible Windows 2000" shows up a lot.) I've never had 2K, only 98 SP2. I miss 98, actually, but have to have an XP machine for grad school. Sigh. So I have one 98 machine and one XP machine, both laptops, which I understand are especially prone to Sims2 + NVidia crappiness.

Any advice or "atta girls" appreciated. Messing about with DLLs and drivers makes me nervous. Default driver was buggy (new machine as of January) and replacement driver is better, but not tweaked for Sims 2.

Getting this (NVidia Forceware 94.20): http://www.tweaksrus.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&Itemid=43&gid=135&orderby=dmdate_published&ascdesc=DESC

Cheers.

[Lorelei]

Farking computer! Ugh.

I haven't done anything other than DL the above noted items. Haven't run them, opened them, touched them in any way. Was waiting until I had free time and a technical friend who might be awake to help if I farzled everything up.

I now have no help / info / etc files in my NVidia control panel, and Seasons closes without even a proper fare-thee-well, just a teeny tiny error box. Very informative, not.



What the hell? Is this related?

As far as the current driver, well, I have my normal settings on the computer, so it is still there as far as I can tell. I usually KNOW when it's being pissy, as everything reverts to the system video driver, which is the standard yucky one that allows for Safe Mode graphics and nothing more.

So NOW what? Gah.

Ignore what WinTaskMan says, I was only running taskmgr explorer and rundll32 when trying to run Sims 2. Additional crap opened to capture error box.

[Lorelei]

Attempting to resolve issue myself, and have renamed The Sims 2 to The Sims 2 backup so the game will regenerate the game files. Maybe a cache file got corrupted somehow, which would be a neat trick as I hadn't done anything to the game.

[OpiumGirl]

Do any of you possibly use the "Bump Map Test" workaround from MTS2...
In that thread you are supposed to do a number of things to get them to show.
I did all of the (changed useshaders to true etc...) and then, because the bump maps still didn't show, I used Rivatuner to force shaders.
I, like you guys, had the same problem with my geforce..
What I did, which may or may not work for you guys (probably won't if you're one of the ones who have tried to force the bump maps) is I reset everything back to default (useshaders false etc) and then changed Rivatuner to "no force" or something like that.
Once I did all of that and updated to the very latest driver, I oddly was able to still see the bump maps, and my game no longer crashed.  I have a feeling that forcing the bump maps was my problem.  Perhaps because the bump maps should have been working by default since I can now see them without altering any settings.
I don't know if that will help and if you find all of that confusing, it's probably because you didn't try to force the bump maps.

Hope that makes some semblance of sense!

[Lorelei]

Didn't mess with bump maps, nope. But thanks for trying to help.

[ZiggyDoodle]

There was a recent sticky over at Sheepsville noting that nVidia has acknowledged it has a major problem - but EA doesn't yet know if nVidia will do a driver update or if the fix will come through a patch.  They are waiting on nVidia.

Lots of people are waiting on nVidia...

[KatEnigma]

Lots of people are waiting on nVidia...

And not just Simmers. I think Nvidia may have done itself more harm than good in rushing out those DX10 cards.

[OpiumGirl]

It's been going on for a long time....a very long time.

Something really funky happened to my computer when I was using one of the more recent versions of nvidia's driver.
My computer would start whirring really loudly and would systematically crash after doing so.
I had a feeling it was the nvidia driver since it was the only thing I had recently installed (at the time).  And sure enough, I unistalled it and used my computer for about 4 days with no sign of the problem.  Now, with the newest driver, things have been going better....but it still isn't perfect by any means.  At least no more whirring or constant crashing.  But the Sims does periodically lock up.

Ever since I installed seasons, I'm unable to run any resolution higher than 800x600!  It's total @$%^ because my system is 2.8ghz and I have a very fast video card....I have no idea if it's related to nVidia's issue, but I did read on another forum that someone with a geForce was having the same problem.
I had to alter the graphicrules.sgr as well as the user settings (.xml file).  But the biggest annoyance in having to manually do this is that there is no way to change the resolution while playing.  So, I'm stuck with one resolution unless I want to quit the game and alter the files all over again.
Sigh.