So, because of excessive begging and whining I bought my daughter the sims2, only to find that both my computers are too old to have sufficient video cards, so I bought a bottom of the line nvidia gforce with 64 megs of ddr ram. It installed just fine, and seemed to work. Then the game hung up and I rebooted and got a screen of gibberish superimposed over the screen you get when pressing f8. Trying to boot in safe mode hung up the computer, showing only a black screen. When I remove the card it works just fine, but of course will not play the game.
OS is XP. Any idea as to why the card would work at first and then not. Any idea on how I can fix this problem?
Here’s a first guess, but when you first set it up did you plug it in and get it all going with the case off? And then perhaps on the second try you put the case back together, slid the machine back under the desk and perhaps unseated the card?
Not trying to talk down to ya, BTW. That is how I usually add cards and such and worry that upon putting the thing back together I’m unseating something.
Zipper, that is exactly what I did. However, I then removed and reinserted the card and tried it out without putting anything back together, or moving the computer. I think a bad card sounds most likely, since it did work at first, but subsequently stopped. Almost like something died when it heated up a little. I was hoping someone would tell me I just didn’t do something right since I bought the card online, and it will be a bit of a hassle to return it.
A couple things I would try–first search online in the Sims support channels, to see if there is a particular game issue with that card.
Another thing would be to reinstall the old card, get online and download the latest drivers for the new card. Then go into the computer’s video settings and turn the screen resolution to its lowest, turn the screen colors to lowest (16 colors), and then turn off all video hardware accelleration. …Then… install the newer card, let XP find whatever drivers it likes and installs automatically, and then immediately run the driver update program.
A third thing I would do (because I have multiple PC’s around) is to try installing the videocard into another computer. BUT–if that other computer is a Windows OS–you should really, really turn the screen resolution down and turn off all video hardware accelleration, which puts the screen into software-display mode. Linux will usually re-discover the new card on its own, but Windows may only hang–because the old drivers are assumed to be proper for the card in use, and then the error that is generated is not one that tells the Windows OS to re-discover the videocard.
~
Did you remember to uninstall the drivers of the old card first, before you put the new card in? If the old card was from a different company, some lingering bits of the drivers may still be around causing problems.