Week 1:
________

1 - During game installation "Ereg has encountered a problem..." with each expansion. Seemed to install fine  
tho.
    Transferred neighbourhood & downloads from old comp.

2 - "Graphics adaptor has experienced an internal error"

3 - PC restarts itself spontaneously. Doesn't seem to be linked to any particular  
interaction/lot/sim/cinematic etc. This usually happens between 5 -15 mins after loading a lot, but  
sometimes it can take up to an hour or more before it happens (but it Always happens)

4 - Monitor goes black and speakers buzz. Pc stays powered but in unresponsive.

5 - Sometimes has red flashing lots in neighbourhood.

6 - Sometimes random red or yellow numbers in the top right corner of the game screen (???).

7 - Ran hack detection utility & scanned for duplicate files. Updated graphics driver. No help.

Week 2:
_______

8 - Ditched the old neighbourhood incase it was borked and started a new one (custom terrain) and clean  
templates. Extracted sims & custom townies from old neighbourhood with simpe. Because it's a new hood all my  
sims are at uni so all my testing here is being done in maxis dorms on a maxis campus.

9 - Still having a mixture of errors 2, 3, 4, 5, & occasionally 6.

10 - New error "The application or dll C\windows\system\quartz.dll is not a valid windows image" during  
game play. Had red flashing lots when this happened.

Week 3:
_______

11 - Backed up hood & uninstalled game. Ran anti-virus, anti-spyware, cleaned registry, defragged. Restarted  
Pc and got the "recovered from a serious error" although no error had happened. 

12 - Uninstalled flash player to avoid error #1 and installed all expansion and patches (no clean templates  
this time). Updated drivers again (tried both ati & Omega), updated windows, sound drivers, codecs,  
microsoft dual core fixes, directx, chipset, flash player.

13 - Still getting error 3 & 4 (but not 5 or 6).

14 - set windows to give a bsod rather than restarting and got:
*** STOP 0x0000008E (0xc0000005, 0xbf22f27d, 0xaae46500, 0x00000000)
*** ati3duag.dll - address bf22f27d base at bf170000 datestamp 475610a4

15 - Uninstalled drivers, ran driver cleaner in safe mode, reinstalled latest ati drivers and some more  
codecs (since the tv's and computers ingame have always been blank on this pc), and another 2 microsoft  
fixes.

16 - New error on bsod:
*** STOP: 0x0000007e (0xc0000005, 0x00005f00, 0xab013980, 0xab01367c)

17 - Installed yet another patch from m$ that supposedly fixes the 0x7e error.

18 - Played for 20 mins and "Application has crashed" (only the second time I've got that message during  
this whole ordeal). 

19 - Did 2 runs (90 mins) of memtest with no errors found.

20 - One fine day I got 4 hours play out of a non-maxis dorm. The game would pause every 5-10 mins and the  
curser would turn into the hourglass for approx 30 seconds at a time, then the game would resume as normal.  
I was able to go to community lots and for the first time close the game myself rather than having it  
shutdown. Next day I got an hour out of a maxis dorm then back to the bsod's.

Week 4:
_______

21 - New bsod ***STOP: 0x00000050  ati3duag.dll  (page fault in nonpaged area) (seems to be the new  
favourite).

22 - New bsod. The computer is shutting down and giving me this bsod evey time I go into the ati ccc and try  
to lower the ant-aliasing settings. ***STOP: 0x00000050  win32k.sys.

23 - Gave up on playing for about 5 days until withdrawals started kicking in and loaded the game again and  
went back into the lot that played fine for 4 hour that fine day, as noted in #20. It paused every 30-60  
seconds, then crashed after 10 minutes.

24 - Depression set in.

25 - Non -sims related. I was shutting down another game and get this bsod:
***STOP: 0x00000050
   ati2cqag.dll page fault in nonpaged area.
The other game hasn't given me any trouble before.

Week 5:
________

26 - Now playing custom hood rather than uni hood. Constant combinations of the above bsod's, but mostly  
0x50 atiduag.dll & win32k.sys errors.

Week 6, 7, 8
_____________

27 - Hate Sims, love Witcher. Have become anti-Sim & pro Scoiatael.

Week 9
_______

28 - Tried Neverwinter Nights 2. Blue screened after about 10-20 mins. Someone else plays Half Life 2 on my  
pc occasionally and, although they don't have marathon gaming sessions, it has never had any errors. The  
witcher crashed on me a handful of times but only when going to the larger areas of Vizima during a long  
session of play.

29 - Started a new neighbourhood with only a few MATY hacks, Insim (obj edition) and 2 sims with custom  
hair, skin and clothes. I put these 2 on an empty small lot with 4 walls and basegame wallpaper. BSOD after  
5 minutes.

30 - Have decided to live with the errors. Am able to get a few hours here and there which is better than  
nothing. Can put up with the constant hourglass and graphical glitches. Just have to remember to save...A  
LOT!

31 - Had to re-install BV to be able to install the new patch.

32 - Installed Freetime. The lot I tested seemed to play fine, but after going to a basegame community lot  
some sims had no bodies, or no hair, one had a blacked out face and another had a completely blacked out  
body. These errors seems to be similar to the previous errors, so probably not specifically related to  
freetime. While at the community lot the game froze for a minute or so then shut down. No error message, it  
just closed and went back to the desktop.


Week 10 thru 17
_____________

33 - Had to test a couple of new sims in an otherwise uninhabited test hood. Crashed after 10 minutes. Have  
been downloading rediculously huge amounts of cc and spending far too much time organizing (then  
re-organizing) my downloads folder to within an inch of it's life in the absence of actually being able to  
play. Installed the Freetime patch & K&B with no installation problems (why bother lol).
Am patiently waiting for the new edition of the Witcher to be released. Until then I will continue to hiss  
at the pc every time it plays up, while simultaniously wishing I had bought a ps3 instead.

End of sanity.














