Found the fix to Sims 3 freezing / crashing and lags!!

giallorossi

I hadn't been able to play Sims 3 ever since I upgraded to my new laptop. The game would start up with "Unrecognized Graphics Card" message, load just fine, and I'd be able to play for a minutes and then the game would freeze, in a few second a blue screen of death would appear and restart my computer. After a while of applying "fixes", I had just given up.

Then one day it occurred to me that I had never checked my virtual memory properties. It was set to the lowest 1,6 gb! When it had to be 12 gb. I immediately changed it. If you don't know what your virtual memory should be set to, please check this tutorial out.

And then I fixed my graphics card issue as told here . Then I crossed my fingers and launched the game. It ran smoothly with no lags, freezes or crashes at all until I stopped playing - 2 hours of gameplay.

I hope this helps all of you who have suffered from this.

Good luck!

igazor

Most users will find that, unless someone or something has meddled with their virtual memory settings, the default ones that Windows sets when it detects the presence of RAM and how much for the first time will work fine. Typically Windows will expand and contract the page file as needed when more virtual memory is called for. TS3 doesn't actually use the paging file very much under typical play conditions.

I'm glad you had results getting your graphics card recognized. Those instructions, although fine, are doing it the difficult way. There are much easier ways to get the same results; we help players with that all the time on the Tech Discussions board here. Usually much more important than formal graphics card recognition is checking on the fps rates with the "fps on" cheat code and using vertical sync or some other means to cap the fps rates. Unlike more modern games, TS3 does not have a built-in fps limiter and the newer, more powerful cards will run wild on it without the capping leading to graphics glitches, screen tears, lag, crashes, and can ultimately burn out the card and the system board. Once we get a player's fps under control, if they haven't done that already, then we maybe worry about the formal card recognition and the texture memory override condition if they are getting that too by doing somewhat more simple edits to the sgr files.