Builders' Boulevard

Ok so its happened to me 3 or 4 times now with different lots with different saved game files, and i can't seem to replicate the problem on demand. Occasionally, it seems that when i go back to "Edit town" to save my build, and i alt-tab while it does its load thing, my game wont maximize again, and if i go to task manager, it says that The Sims 3 is not responding. Therefore, i lose everything i just did. I had the entire shell of this weeks challenge done, with some furnishings and all the paint and flooring finished, and it happened again.

Anyone have any ideas why this is happening or what to do? It has happened both before and after WA came out. I have no custom content, other then wallpaper and patterns from other houses. The event viewer for Sims doesn't show any crashes or anything, so Husband is at a loss as to what it is as well. Its so frustrating!

hmm, sounds like it could be a video card thing to me but I may be way off. I can ask my Husband when he gets home today, but he will probably say it is because , and I quote, "The games a piece of crap! What else can you expect from EA?"  He dislikes the sims games for a reason he won't really say. I think he is just jealous because I have a game I have played fro 6 years and he gets bored with his after he beats them.:tongue:

Oh, does it only happen when you Alt-tab out of the game?

Yeah, only when i alt tab. and lol @ the EA thing. Husband is like that with me too

I mentioned it to him. He said some games just take up a lot of ram and what not to run. I know mine gets slow when I do other stuff while saving a game. I have two, 1GB sticks of ram in my PC. I even noticed that the computer runs a bit slow after I play the game. So I reckon the only thing I can say is to maybe just wait till its done saving before doing anything else.:dry:  Sorry if I wasn't much help.

Saving any game uses up a lot of computer resources. Sims 3 specially as the saves are rather large. Not a good time to ask your computer to do anything else if you value the information you are saving. I have long gotten out of the habit of even using the "Save and Quit" feature as one step, with any game or software, let alone Sims 3 with known saving difficulties. Also if a game isn't running in Windows mode, like most people run Sims 3, going back to the desktop is a higher than normal time for system mess ups and crashes. Asking your machine to both save and jump back to Windows at the same time is tempting fate. Might not happen everytime, but even one time in a hundred is too much when I am saving my work. Pallypoo has the best advice, wait for your game to save before returning to the desk top. Not fun advice for the multi-taskers among us, I know. Lol.

I've gotten in the habit of saving and then after the save, just quit. At least I know my game is still in tack when I quit that way.