Simcity4 Is So Unstable

[Mattoman 0]

i dont think a day has gone by when ive been playing this and i havn't had a problem. It crashes once a day easily and most of the time during the 'save' Why did maxis release this game when it clearly isnt finished. My system should have no trouble running it either

[1973tr6 0]

Exactly what hardware are you running???  I've got a 6 or 7-year old pc that is seriously under the recommended specifications for SC4\RH, and have suffered only 1 crash in the last 20 hours or more of play.  And I think that was when I was plopping something on a TE lot, I think.  And that is a known bug.  I would suspect a setting somewhere that needs to be changed.  The fact that it happens during the save might indicate that your hard drive is struggling to find free space.  Or maybe your screen saver is trying to kick in and causing a problem.  I have had screen savers that I have had to disable so they didn't interfere with some games, including SC.  I have had instances of playing SC for a half- hour or 45 minutes and the screen saver tries to kick in.  Its kinda scary when your game goes to black screen, but I found that after a minute or so it recovered.  Look around the forums and omnibus and see if you can find some ideas.

The point is that SC4\RH has been out for several years now (3??), and there are literally thousands and thousands of people world-wide happily playing it.  Many of them are members of this site.  Before getting discouraged and quitting the game entirely, look around and see if you can find someone else who had similar experiences and ask what they did to solve their problems.

Good luck

[+Guest]

It sounds like your system isn't up to SC or you got to many other things running at the same your trying to run SC or you have downloaded something odd.

  I have a system that is about 6 years old and the only problems so far is a lttle lag and the only crash is when I'm trying to use GLR.

[Mattoman 0]

AMD Athlon - 2.0Ghz

Ram - 1GB

Hard Drive - 100GB + free space

Video Card - Gefore MX 440

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ill try that screensaver because its set to kcik in after 5mins so ill change it to 20

[+Guest]

Looking at your specs keeping in mind I'm guessing it appears you shouldn't have a problem.Someone told me to close out all unused before running the game like screensavers but don't Systray and Explore alone.
    Also I defrag my thing once a week and got rid of all of the JPG images that came with the downloads.

[callagrafx 3]

Also, how are you saving? Are you using "save and exit to region" or just the "save" (disk) icon?

[ccecill 52]

I'd just turn the screensaver off. That's what I do.

[AnAlmondGarfield 0]

have you updated your game on the maxis website. my game used to crash all the time until i patched it

[Mattoman 0]

Yes, i have the latest patch. And i normally do both, Save and exit to region more but

[dadyrghluv 8]

mattoman check to see your pagefile size. it should be double your size in ram i believe. so if u have 1024MB of ram or 1 gig, then u should have a 2048 pagefile size. windows supports up to 4096MB of pagefilesize. if u can spare the extra space try using the maximum allowed and see if this improves things. also remember if u have it or not to turn off AA (antiailasing) and AF (antiscoptic filtering). these will produce horrid results and are not supported by SC4 as they we're not availble when SC4 was released. check to make sure your GFX card heat threshold is not being exceeded due to intense graphics, and or u have sufficient power from your PSU and that u have the latest drivers for your card. this was a problem i had with mine so i upgraded to a 600W PSU and problem solved.

[Mattoman 0]

Yeh, i also checked this. But im only using about 784mb pagefile size... im unsure why though.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Your 768MB page size might be a left over from when you had less memory, or someone did when setting up the machine.  Try setting it to (initial, maximum) = (2048, 4096).

Be sure to do a defrag run once a week and do file clean up as well.  If you can get it, you can use diskkeeper to run constant defrags when your screen saver runs.

If your graphics card has options like anti-aliasing, set them to "application selected".  SC likes unfancy graphics cards better.  It doesn't understand anything advanced.

Do not play longer than about half an hour without a save.  You can save by pressing CTRL+S.  If save takes a l-o-n-g time, exit the game and run a defrag on the drive.

[Wei 0]

yes! the thrirty-minute save rule is vital in my point of view. you should also always save after you've just acomplished someone really big and important, like if you just got your first skyscraper or finished topping off that complex transportation system.

i think i should also tell you about the time my game crashed no longer than 7 seconds after i had saved one of my city hafen-stadt !

[Mattoman 0]

Ive had this computer for 2 years and over 100GB of hard drive and not once have i defragged :S

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Originally posted by: Mattoman Ive had this computer for 2 years and over 100GB of hard drive and not once have i defragged :Squote>

Continuing to ignore good practice does not make it right.  The very large multi-extent files in city saves will (have?) kill you someday (now?).

[Mattoman 0]

That made no sense to me what so ever

[dadyrghluv 8]

basically if u don't defrag/maintance, u will end up paying for it with a corrupt city/region. it does happen more often than i'd like it to.

[USMC 0]

Defrag your disk and try again. You might be surprised what a difference it will make if you haven't defragged in 2 yrs. Good luck.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I thiink I was pretty obvious.  Is English not  your first language?  In any case, you are playing with fire by not maintaining your very fragile disk system.  NTFS is the best so far, but disk file systems are always pretty fragile if not looked after.

Schedule a defragmentation run overnight.  After 2 years it will take quite a while.  You should do a disk clean up first.  It too takes a long time.

[+Guest]

Luke feel the force and Defrag.