Critical Disk Maintenance Items

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This game creates very fragmented save files.  This is because they are large.  This slows down loading and can impact your ability to save a city properly.

Once a week, or more often, you need to:

1. Run disk cleanup
2. Run disk defragmenter

on your hard disk that contains your My documents (Documents on Vista) folder.

To run these, go to (My) Computer and right click on the drive icon.  Choose properties.

The Disk Cleanup button is on the first page.

The Defragment button is on the tools page.

If you haven't ever done this, schedule the defragmentation over night.

[waway625 72]

and disktrix ultimate defrag, and force the defragmenter to place your SC4 files (and games for that matter) to be placed on the outer part of the disk (fastest part) and your least used programs/files on the inner part

[KLB 0]

Thanks for the advice. This never occurred to me as the cause of some of my performance issues.

[KLB 0]

As a follow up to this post I spent a lot of effort defraging my C drive, which houses my primary SimCity Application files, and this tremendously speeded up SimCity (My region and plugin files are stored on a different drive)

[trolleyman515 0]

? if i move my plugins and region to a removeable memory stick will that help the speed and will SC4 be able to pull up those idems off the stick

[FrankU 354]

No, I think it will not work, because your game will not find the plugins. They must be in the My Documents/Simcity4/Plugins folder. But then, maybe you know a way of putting this directory on the stick.

On the other hand: maybe you can install the game on the stick and then put your plugins in the pluginsfolder in the game-directory. This could work..... But what will happen if you remove the stick and reboot your computer? The registry won't find the registered game and maybe gives off alarms? I never experimented with such installations.

But is stick memory not very slow?

[SC4BOY 20]

You COULD (I'm avoiding the technical details here due to my answer) put them on a stick.. but WHY? SC4 only "executes" the load at the beginning and then doesn't re-read files til you save or quit or whatever.. It operates out of memory and/ or virtual memory. So you MAY speed loading a tiny bit, but that is only once when you start.. then you're right where you started.

Now if you wanted to put your VIRTUAL MEMORY on a stick, that MAY be a different thing.. but unless you are aware of the various risks of doing this it probably isn't advisable due to what happens if the stick fails or if it gets unplugged..

Stick memory (modern stuff anyways) may be "slow" but it is WAY faster than your HD read/writes.. the HD is likely the slowest thing on your system by far.

If you watch (or listen) to your HD as you are playing SC4 you can probably get an idea of how much "churning" your machine does.. by churning i mean how much your system has to read/write to the HD (virtual memory) during play.. if you have a fair amount of memory.. 2G you should RARELY have a hit.. as you drop it will get worse.. when you get down around 250MB you will start to have significant problems..(lagging) especially if you have a "shared memory" video card.

[BEJA 2]

N_O_Body...maybe you can help....In one of my Regions, I have just finished building a large retail shopping area, in a city called Pacifica, and did so while I had the game in pause mode. My last save was also in pause mode. Now, when I load the city, it appears very briefly and then crashes to my desktop. When it appears, naturally it is in pause mode, as that is the last time I saved. I am wondering if there is a way to avert the crash, get it out of pause and allow it to run. Every other city in the Region is fine, and they all work well...it is just Pacifica. Now, I realise that maybe I put too many custom lots in...so is there also a way for me to take some of those out prior to loading the city?

BEJA

[amdinside 2]

BEJA-You can try and move the custom content that is causing the issue out of your plugins folder. This will give you the brown boxes but if you can access your city, you can buldoze the problem lots to see if that helps.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

BEJA:  You could have some bad plugins, but more likely you are simply out of table space because of all the add ins.  Could you post the first 25 lines of your Exception Report for this crash.  We don't need the dump, just the control panels.

[BEJA 2]

Hi, and thanks for responding N_O_Body....here are the first 25 lines:

Exception time: 11/29/2007, at 08:46:39.

Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION.

Current thread ID: 3712 (0x00000e80).

Version information:

Application/module path: C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Apps\SimCity 4.exe

Application/module version name: SimCity 4

Application/module version: 1.1.640.0

System version: Windows NT 5.1

System memory: 1984 Megabytes total, 736 Megabytes free.

Exception module: C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Apps\SimCity 4.exe.

Exception address: 0x006a5b2a. Sectionffset: 0x01:0x0029eb2a.

Registers

EAX: 00000000

EBX: 00000098

ECX: 3085af34

EDX: 1659ff54

ESI: 1d83b5a8

EDI: 1d125014

CS:EIP: 001b:006a5b2a

SS:ESP: 0023:0012f8c4 EBP:0000001c

DS:0023 ES:0023 FS:003b GS:0000

Flags: 00010246

...and I apoligise for posting this in this section, I should have realised that making a seperate subject would have been better!

BEJA (Bruce)

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I think that it is an out of (virtual) memory problem.  Increase your Virtual memory to maximum (4096MB) for both initial and maximum size and see what happens.  The stuff you added to the city probably overflowed the memory tables when the simulator fleshed them out after you took it out of pause.

[BEJA 2]

...Well, I changed my Virtual Memory to 4096. actually I had it set for 5096, which most likely was too much....and just a history, I have been following your advice religously in regards to Disk Management, with defragging and the whole lot.

So today, after visiting several of my cities in the same region, I tried to enter Pacifica and the same thing happpened. So I have included, here, the whole Exception Report of today.

Just a little something else, when I was in Pacifica and building the Retail Centre, this is what actually happened during that first crash: After building, my budget was around 490,000 dollars....so as mentioned previously, I saved the city, then once that was completed, I took Pacifica off pause...which it did, and then crashed...but I did notice that in the split second from taking off pause to the crash, my Budget figure went to blank...don't know if that means anything.

The Report:

Exception time: 12/03/2007, at 10:52:23.

Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION.

Current thread ID: 3536 (0x00000dd0).

Version information:

Application/module path: C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Apps\SimCity 4.exe

Application/module version name: SimCity 4

Application/module version: 1.1.640.0

System version: Windows NT 5.1

System memory: 1984 Megabytes total, 708 Megabytes free.

Exception module: C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Apps\SimCity 4.exe.

Exception address: 0x006a5b2a. Sectionffset: 0x01:0x0029eb2a.

Registers

EAX: 00000000

EBX: 00000098

ECX: 2a9100d4

EDX: 2a653094

ESI: 28a472ec

EDI: 2872d414

CS:EIP: 001b:006a5b2a

SS:ESP: 0023:0012f8c4 EBP:0000001c

DS:0023 ES:0023 FS:003b GS:0000

Flags: 00010246

Loaded Modules

Address Size Module Path

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0x00400000 8187904 SimCity 4.exe C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Apps\SimCity 4.exe

0x7c900000 720896 ntdll.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntdll.dll

0x7c800000 1003520 kernel32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\kernel32.dll

0x7e410000 589824 USER32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\USER32.dll

0x77f10000 290816 GDI32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\GDI32.dll

0x77dd0000 634880 ADVAPI32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\ADVAPI32.dll

0x77e70000 593920 RPCRT4.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\RPCRT4.dll

0x71ad0000 36864 WSOCK32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\WSOCK32.dll

0x71ab0000 94208 WS2_32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\WS2_32.dll

0x77c10000 360448 msvcrt.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\msvcrt.dll

0x71aa0000 32768 WS2HELP.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\WS2HELP.dll

0x42c10000 847872 WININET.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\WININET.dll

0x77f60000 483328 SHLWAPI.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\SHLWAPI.dll

0x00320000 36864 Normaliz.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\Normaliz.dll

0x42990000 282624 iertutil.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\iertutil.dll

0x7c9c0000 8482816 SHELL32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\SHELL32.dll

0x73f10000 376832 DSOUND.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\DSOUND.dll

0x774e0000 1298432 ole32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\ole32.dll

0x76b40000 184320 WINMM.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\WINMM.dll

0x77c00000 32768 VERSION.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\VERSION.dll

0x5ed00000 835584 OPENGL32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\OPENGL32.dll

0x68b20000 131072 GLU32.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\GLU32.dll

0x73760000 299008 DDRAW.dll C:\WINDOWS\system32\DDRAW.dll

0x7

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Remember, none of us can read that dump since we don't have the load map of the game.  Please do not post stuff after the register panel, as it is useless info.

You have an "ACCESS VIOLATION" which is a catch all.  Have you run maintenance on your hard disk lately? (disk cleanup and defrag).

This could be a memory error of several stripes:

Page Cannot be Found

Disk Error reading page

Page table scrambled

Hard memory failure

etc.

etc.

It could also be a plugin conflict or error.  You might want to examine your most recent plugins in a sandbox environment.  Over in Bugs and Technical Issues there is a pinned thread on how to examine your plugins.

This is the wrong thread for this, so why not create a new one over in B & TI for it, and we'll take it from there.  Thanks.

[BEJA 2]

Thanks, and again sorry for posting this here...I have started a new threan entitled "City Crashes-Only One"

Bruce

[EmpireTalona 0]

How do you get lighting at night for ploppables that i downloaded here on simtropolis, is it a mod?

[rushman5 33]

[unnecessary comment deleted]

EmpireTalona: there is a place for these kind of posts, and this is not the place. May I suggest the omnibus? Or maybe the home page where there is a thread called "read here before you post".

I will give you the same advice, this topic is for disc maintenance, and not for guestions about Vista.  You could be a little more tolerant towards new members.

tungston

Anywho, I have been following your advice, and am wondering if using these steps would help any on Vista. I'm not downgrading, b/c its not my PC, but out of curiosity, what do you reccomend doing on Vista to optimize it for Sc4?

Specs: Intel dual core @ 1.866 GHz, 1024 MB RAM, 128 MB Intel Integrated Graphics, 100GB Hard drive, Vista Business, VERY graphically glitchy, but fast and smooth (apart from the graphical freak-outs (texture-wise: fine w/out and plugins)

[tungston 19]

Integrated graphics aren't the best for games, and a GB of memory with Vista is barely enough for SC4. A better video card, and another GB of memory will do wonders for the game. Other than that Vista runs the game without any tweaks.