Help with SC4 crash

[portlander420 1]

I play sc4 every other day and yesterday i went to my computer and started the game up. i waited for my game to load (with usually takes 5 min.) i realised it was taking longer than usual. after about 10 min the EA logo appeared and froze shortly after, thus bringing me to desktop   i retryed twice and looked online for any tips or causes. i eventually uninstalled and reinstalled my game after downloadind directx9 and a vga card driver, Still to my luck it froze. While online i noticed that other people had simmilar to the same problem as me, but i could not find a patch or anything. Well if anyone has had this problem before and fixed it i could use some help any advice is appericated

[Mootilda 76]

I wonder whether you are having heat problems? Has the weather changed recently? Have you cleaned your machine recently?

Here's a helpful post about heat problems.  It's about Sims 2, rather than SimCity, but the advice still holds:

http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game%20Helpnboard%20Graphics#Clean_Your_Computer

[portlander420 1]

no i have cleaned my computer inside and out and i am completly up to date but thanks for the tip ill try it

[Mootilda 76]

Sorry, I can't get the link to work, probably because of the special characters.

This is the link, without the autolink:

http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game%20Help:onboard%20Graphics#Clean_Your_Computer

Can you think of anything else that may have changed recently?

[DITRO 15]

Is your computer in a well-ventilated area? If it's in a cabinet or closed-in place instead of out in the open, it could lead to the heat problems Mootilda's talking about.

[portlander420 1]

the only thing i can think to do is to install a new sound and video card maybe update directx?

[portlander420 1]

it almost seems like im missing part of the games file but i have uninstalled and reinstalled

[SC4BOY 20]

Originally posted by: portlander420

I play sc4 every other day and yesterday i went to my computer and started the game up. i waited for my game to load (with usually takes 5 min.) i realised it was taking longer than usual. after about 10 min the EA logo appeared and froze shortly after, thus bringing me to desktop   i retryed twice and looked online for any tips or causes. i eventually uninstalled and reinstalled my game after downloadind directx9 and a vga card driver, Still to my luck it froze. While online i noticed that other people had simmilar to the same problem as me, but i could not find a patch or anything. Well if anyone has had this problem before and fixed it i could use some help any advice is appericated

quote>

From your comments, I gather that it DID work before. SC4 is odd in that it REQUIRES properly functioning sound hardware and drivers. It is true that if you've had a card (or it may be built into you motherboard) failure that it can prevent the game from running.

Originally posted by: portlander420

the only thing i can think to do is to install a new sound and video card maybe update directx?quote>

I know of no way to get around that so I think your conclusion that you will have to get some kind of working card (it can be the cheapest thing you can get ahold of) and install it to get SC4 to work again. I assume your other programs are missing sound too? 

[portlander420 1]

yea it was my sound card i have to reinstall it everytime i boot up my computer for some strange reason???

[SC4BOY 20]

Do you by chance have both a card in a slot AND an on-board sound chip? You may have to disable the mo-board one (via bios settings) to get the plugin to work properly. Run "dxdiag" ("start", "run", type "dxdiag", hit return) and see what it thinks about your sound situation.

[joshriddle 29]

Okay, if you go onto your My Computer area, and go to Local Hard Drive C:\\, and bring up program files, it will have SC4 and all the configuration settings and audio and graphics and everything in there. Maybe you acidentally deleted one of them?

Or here is a very major factor. The hard drive may be old, and I don't know if you know what a bad block is, they are torn down and even dangerous sectors of the hard drive, and all the SC4 files could be stored there. This happened with lot Editor, it was on a bad block, the application would hang up and crash all the time. My dad has a thing-of-a-jiggy called SpinRite, it is a little disk of sort, not a CD or DVD disk, I don't know what they call them, the little plastic, square ones. I could take usually all day and all night sometimes, but what it does is when you reboot, it automatically comes on when starting up, and will give you options on what to do. Honestly, I don't know what the operation is to remove bad data off the damaged sectors, it may have come with an instruction manual to see. It also shuts off the bad areas of the drive to stop data from being rewritten there. I am also sure they have other brands of that stuff, but you can run that, and then reinstall it gian, and everything, including the game, if it was sitting on a damages sector will run better. I had to run it on mine because it had 4 of them, Lot Editor runs fine now, and everything else is fine and good.

And it takes your game 5 minutes to load up? I would say there is something wrong there in itself if it is taking that long. Mine only takes a minute, and I have vey low specs on my computer, and it is 8 years old, got it in 2003 wuth XP, so there is a sign of a distressed area of the hard drive there. Other than this, I don't know what to tell ya. As a matter of fact, PM me and let me know if it is one or not. It will say if there are bad blocks in the Event Viewer under Computer Management, in the Control Panel under Administrative Tools, the event log, applications, I think it is, look for an error, and right click on and error, and read the description, it should say, the hard drive has a bad block.

So PM me and let me know what it is, okay? allright. Glad to help ya!

ps: why does it say i'm offline when I look at this reply?