I ordered myself a copy of the Sims 3 for when it was going to be released. I got it about 5 days after its release, which was pretty fast so that was good. Then I did not get around to installing the game until about another week or so since I did not have the time to do it.

I decided to install it onto my main desktop PC, it met all the requirements for the game and so I popped in the disc, and then the problems just began from there. It was fine for about 75% of the install until it ran into a crc error, then I kept retrying it and had no luck whatsoever. I then tried to ignore the error and it would finish the installation, but then when you went to play the game it would not load, obviously the file I skipped was important!

I started to look online to see if anyone else had run into a problem like mine and to my surprise a lot of people had the exact same problem! 😀 Not just me! So they all had no idea what was wrong, some people suggested that the crc error would of occurred due to a corrupt disc, but there are only so many corrupt disc’s per batch created and it was unlikely that we all happened to get them!

After about 2 hours of trying to find a decent solution to my problem online I decided to take a break and try it again myself. I also own a laptop so I decided to see if it would install on it, and what do you know it did! It actually worked for some reason! 😮 The laptop is not as good as my PC in any way, so it was very strange that it worked at all! I came to the assumption that the disc drive on the laptop was newer than that of the PC so it would be a better quality one, that could be the only reason for it working.

The file that the crc error always stopped (FullBuild1.package) on seemed to be one of the biggest files on the disc so I thought that the disc drive on my PC must struggle with reading large files. So I decided to copy the entire disc’s content onto my PC’s hard drive, excluding the file it had problems with, and then I put the disc back into my laptop and copied the large file to a memory stick and the put the memory stick into my PC and added it into the right place along with all the other installation files.

You can always install a game by copying the disc’s content to your hard drive; you just can’t play it from the hard drive. So after having all the files on my hard drive, this took about 40 minutes, I started the installation and it worked perfectly! No errors, no problems, it was great. Then I decided to start playing the game and no problems at all occurred. If you have the crc error, then chances are if you try this method you should have no problem with getting the game working.

So that was the problem out of the way and then I found another! I started to play the game and created my first family in it, then bought a house, began to decorate it and then BOOM! Screen flashes blue then black and no amount of buttons would get it back up! The bloody PC crashed! I had to restart the PC then I found out what the error was and it was an error regarding my graphics card. I quickly checked my graphics cards specs and compared them to the back of the games case, and they were better than the box! So there should be no problem with it, and it is even in the list of supported graphic cards provided on the Sims website!

I had no idea how to fix this so I tried all the usual updating the graphics card driver and no joy, it still would not work :(. I then went over to the Sims 3 support page and filled in the tech problem form and sent it off along with a direct x information file that they request, it contains all the specs of you system. I got a response from them the next day. They told me my graphics card needed to be updated and gave me a link to a page with it, and when I went to install it, my bloody PC crashed again, and again every time I tried it. So I just gave up.

At the moment I am playing it on my laptop, it is a bit slow but it is better than nothing, I will at some stage try to get back around to having a look at it and try to get it working again.