I just want a kitty!

April 20, 2007 8:31 PM

Why does The Sims 2 Pets expansion refuse to install?

For Christmas, I received The Sims 2 Pets expansion and it ran perfectly. But somehow, I lost the first disc which is needed to run it. So, I bought the game again and decided to have a fresh install of The Sims 2 and Pets. I installed The Sims 2 and Open For Business just fine, but when I install Pets (which takes forever) the high speed spinning of the drive makes the whole laptop vibrate and the cursor of the game flashes in and out. The game is just really buggy.

My drivers are up to date and the drive works flawlessly otherwise. I've also downloaded and run all the patches.

What else could it be?

posted by ThirstyEar2 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Start here.

Some other ideas... If you have the receipt for the game, exchange it as defective and see if that helps? Most stores will let you exchange open games for the same exact game if there's a defect.

The other thing you can check is if this version of Pets has any special hardware or video requirements that your computer might not be up for.
posted by jerseygirl at 8:57 PM on April 20, 2007

If possible backup up your data, format your drive and reinstall windows. It will probably be the most effective solution--albeit time and resource heavy.
posted by oxford blue at 9:43 PM on April 20, 2007

Sounds like you might have an out of balanced disc, which under high speed rotation leads to the vibration and the (performancing-robbing) re-reads of tracks or possibly causes corruption of data. Try getting a replacement CD by returning the original as damaged goods.

Also, you might have a sensitive drive, some brands are less forgiving than others for marginal CD's. Or worse news, it could be the drive is starting to go south and it's picked that CD as the one to display the first symptoms on. If you Google around, you'll see people mention all three possibilities for vibration. But I'd vote for a bad CD, and it's the easiest to check

On the tiny chance you might be tempted, do not reformat your hard drive and reinstall Windows to try to correct for bad game install. I can't tell if that's meant to be a joke or a real suggestion, but it is ludicrous overkill that likely would have no effect on this situation whatsoever.
posted by mdevore at 10:19 PM on April 20, 2007

When my laptop's CD drive vibrates, I push in very gently on the "door", and that helps stop the vibrations. Of course, that's fine for the install, but I imagine it would be a little hard to hold the drive in while playing.

My laptop is also 5 years old so I'm willing to take risks with it.
posted by IndigoRain at 12:04 AM on April 21, 2007

So when you install the game there's a couple of things that happen (presumably, I'm generalizing from other game insalls).

I. The installer you're running from the CD figures out where you're Sim install is located on you're hard drive and checksums it to make sure it's ok.

II. The installer copies/decompresses data from the CD to your hard drive.

III. The installer makes registry changes to reflect the new install.

Copy protection malarky doesn't hit until you try to run the actual executable from you're HD. It should install ok from any cd drive that's working normally. (passing copy protection could depend on the drive, but it should install at least from pretty much anything)

I probably isn't failing since the installer should give a sensible error message and the vanilla sims shouldn't run if the original install is borked.

II is probably what's dying from your description. It sounds like either the disk or your drive is bad. To test the drive, I'd time how long it takes to copy the entire contents of the CD to a hard drive on your laptop and on a computer with a known working cd drive of similar speed. If they're similar I'd blame the disk, and if they're very different I'd blame your drive. A normal installshield installer doesn't do anything fancy with file IO, so if it's craping out it's not getting valid data due to either the disk or the drive.

I don't know how'd you screw up posibility III, but if it's only dying at the end of the install it's either the very end of the data copying or the post-copying registry/start menu changes that are killing it
posted by Diz at 1:15 AM on April 21, 2007

Officially Sims 2 doesn't support laptops, but it sounds like it's more of a hardware issue than a software one. A few things you can try:

1. Get the disc changed. From the description it sounds like there is something odd going on with the disc itself (as the previous one worked fine and no other discs cause this problem.)

2. If you have installed the game and this vibration is happening while you're playing, you can download a no-CD patch online. These patches aren't official, but as far as I know, are legal. It lets you run the game without the CD present. This shouldn't be necessary however as the CD is not really used during the playing of the game, it only verifies the game as legit before launching off the hard drive.

3. One thing to do as well, instead of going for the reinstallation of Windows entirely, is to clean out the registry after you've uninstalled the game. Go to the Start Menu, choose Run and type in 'regedit'. Then do a search for 'Sims 2' and 'Sims'. The second of these options will bring back a lot of unrelated stuff (that is needed by Windows and you don't want to delete) so just look at the path name of the files. If it mentions EA Games or Maxis or Pets/Open for Business, then they're good to delete. Also be sure to fully delete any files/folders created in My Documents or in Program Files/EA Games/. Be warned however, that doing this will completely get rid of any saves/profiles, so creating a backup is highly recommended.

Full disclaimer: I work for EA as a tester, and have clocked in more hours installing and uninstalling the Sims and all of its expansion packs than I care to admit...
posted by slimepuppy at 2:29 AM on April 21, 2007