Well, That Didn't Work

[doronjosima]

New video card has been installed! Videos look great and run perfectly! Warcraft runs super smooth and looks fantastic! I loaded the Sims 2 and it looked great too!

For about an hour, until it crashed. With the same accursed D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE error.

I am seriously ready to tear my hair out at this point. Here is what I have done:

--rebuilt my computer from the ground up- new motherboard, RAM, hard drive, power supply (quite a beefy one as well), new case with more fans in it and as of today, brand new video card
--updated all my video card drivers
--updated my DirectX, and run all dxdiag tests possible (all 3D works perfect on that, all test results returned the "no problems detected" message)
--tried adjusting graphics settings in-game (both to the recommended lower settings and recommended higher settings, since others online have had one or the other work for them)
--tried playing in windowed mode
--completely uninstalled and reinstalled my game (it throws the error when I have no custom content installed and when I have all my CC installed, so it's clearly not that)
--read literally 16 pages of Google results for the error message- not ONE of them had a solution either, tech forums are baffled entirely

Nothing has helped. The game continues to throw this error. I have been fighting it for six months now. SIX MONTHS. Rebuilding the PC did nothing. Updating drivers did nothing. Reinstalling the game did nothing. Reinstalling DirectX did nothing. Removing custom content did nothing. All the in-game tricks people suggested in various threads did nothing. I have no idea at this point what the hell is wrong with my game. I'm starting to think it's just cursed and this is a not-so-subtle hint that I should quit. That is pretty upsetting, since I love to play, to create Sims and build & decorate houses for them. But I honestly have no other options.

I'm pretty peevish about this whole mess.

Comments

[simlili.livejournal.com]

Hello!
I stumbled here randomly, when the dreaded "D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE" caught my eye. I had the same problem, complete with BSOD and reboots, with my old Nvidia card, and I assume yours is an Nvidia too. I never found a solution, but I switched to ATI Radeon and the problem completely disappeared, even with the cheapest Radeon I could find (HD5450). Since then, I bought a better one (HD5770), but the problem is clearly in the Nvidia card, since I don't have it anymore, with the cheap or the less cheap Radeon. And I didn't change anything else to my system.

I know it doesn't help much, but I remember going insane with trying everything as you described, going through countless Google results for nothing. In the end I added RAM, which is probably what killed the old card (a 2007 GeForce 8600GT). I'm glad it's dead, that frustrating error died with it!

I hope you find a solution too :)

[doronjosima.livejournal.com]

Ah! I didn't even see you'd commented till today! (I fail at reading my old entries sometimes...)

I did finally get the damn error fixed; turned out it was my antivirus conflicting with my Sims game! Since I switched to a different antivirus, I haven't had the problem at all, it's been such a relief.

Now if I could just get some TIME to play my game it'd be excellent!