Sims 2 freezes on Create a Family loading screen. What can I do to fix this?

Question

I'm on a Gateway laptop with Vista. I installed the Sims 2. It gave me a little error box when I tried to play it, saying it had compatibility issues. I ignored it and tried to play.

Everything was fine until I went to create a family in my new neighborhood. It's on the loading screen, with all the blue boxes, and the rows do the lighting up thing, and then it goes back so that none of them are lit up, and the mouse stops changing between a pointer and an hourglass, and it just stays on the pointer. The music is still going, and I wait and wait, and it doesn't do anything. When I bring up the task manager, it says it isn't responding. I end it, retry, still does it.

So I finally fixed the compatibility thing - turns out all I needed to do was download a patch from the Sims 2 website. So then the compatibility box stopped showing up.

But I still have the same freezing problem! I've deleted groups.cache, but it kept coming back each time I tried to play it - so I eventually just went through the security thing for that folder and made it where my computer can't create files in that folder. But it's still freezing.

Someone please help me, this is extremely frustrating!

Also, I still have a ton of space left - 71.7 GB free of 138 on my Local Disk (C) drive, and 3.88 GB free of 10.2 GB on my Recovery (D) drive.

And I don't have any custom content downloaded, either! I just installed it.

Please help!

Answer 1

You can reinstall this and if this doesn't work try and call the help and support center of the publisher of the game.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Your graphics card might be the issue, especially since you have a laptop AND Vista. Laptops aren't known for their great graphics cards. According to EA, to play the base game on Vista you must have one of the following cards:

Best Cards:

NVidia 6000 series and above. (6600, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950, 8800)

ATI Radeon 9800 and above. (9800, X550, X600, X700, X800, X850, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950)

OK Cards :

ATI Radeon 9600, 9700, X300, X1300

NVidia 6200, 7100

You must also have a 1.3GHz processor.

They also say: When launching the game, always use the Start Menu, desktop shortcut, or Game Explorer so that you saved games are saved in your Standard User profile. If you run the game with Administrator privileges, then your Administrator profile will be used for saved games.

Edit: yes your video card and graphics card are the same thing. Did you try the recommended test, not just the minimum? And what did it say your card was?