My Sims Machine Died (and what I did about it)

[Greg]

Progress Report: I got The Sims 2 installed last night and foolishly stayed up too late trying it out. (Circe Beaker is having an affair with Vidcund Curious. Tragic.) It's amazing how fast this new machine is. I can spin big lots around in circles with no detectable lag or degradation in graphics, and all the texture detail is there.

I found that I really, really missed GunMod's Camera Mod and the Insimenator!

[Sita]

but but - isn't he her brother in law or something?

lol Vidcund is the Strangetown Sim I have played most, and Circe ALWAYS meets with unfortunate accidents... poor unlucky, grouchy Sim that she is...

Now in my vast experience the problem with computers is similar to that with cars - it's often the nut behind the wheel. Sounds like the nut is screwed in quite firmly in your case )

And re your progress! WOOOOOT!!! congratulations!

[Greg]

Well, let's not forget that the nut behind the keyboard is reponsible for spranching his machine in the first place!

Last night I got WebDrive going and tested it. Yup! I can upload pictures again. Windows Vista doesn't behave the same so it might take me a while to find ways to speed up the process of getting files on line, but other than that, it's the same familiar environment!

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for my empty disk case to arrive.

[Greg]

Anticipation: UPS says my new toy made it to Houston and will arrive tomorrow!

[Greg]

I am happy to report that at this very moment, my old disk drive, mounted in that external drive case I was talking about, is now uploading my old The Sims 2 folder to my new machine.

I think the only thing I need out of the Program Files directory is GunMod's camera mod, so once this thing gets copied--about 2 hours from now--I can fire it up and see if my newly installed game can run all the old data files. I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work but I won't stop being nervous about it until I'm once again running around Happy Valley!

[Greg]

I think I learned something. It might have been the jumpers that prevented those disks from working in my new machine. The main system disk for the old machine had the jumper in the "cable select" position instead of the "master" position.

[Greg]

Oddly, the number of GB remaining is still going down, but the estimated time to completion is going UP!

Now it's saying that it will take another 3 hours and 24 minutes.

[Greg]

Now 58 minutes and 24 seconds.

Windows Vista time doesn't seem to bear much more relation to reality than Sims time!

[Greg]

Now 12 minutes and 55 seconds. Time's a-flyin' by!

[Greg]

Done!

[Miros1]

And is Anja happy in her new home?

[Greg]

Yippeee! It worked!

She sure is! So far I've been able to run with a bazillion and one sims on a very large, complex lot and the graphics haven't gone weird on me!

(I was going to show you a screen shot but at the last minute I realized that one of my sims was inappropriately dressed for Sun Sims. Oops!)

[homerette]

Nice to know that things are going your way!

[Sita]

WOOT

great stuff Greg! Glad to know all your Simmies have arrived in and are liking their new home.

[Roxy2004]

Been following your saga on pin and needles. Glad to know everyone got moved to their new homes safely.

[Greg]

Thanks, Roxy & Sita & Homerette!

Now I'm trying to figure out why Body Shop freezes up while I'm paging through the catalog of adult female tops; but I s'pose I should post a note about that in the Help section.

[Miros1]

How's this theory: Anja read my post about more memory and bigger video cards (in response to your post about what electronic people could possibly want), so she sabotaged your original computer to get a better home.

[Greg]

I wouldn't put it past her! My game seems to be ruled by She Who Must Be Obeyed in collusion with She Who Gets Her Way Anyhow.

[Greg]

I had an interesting anomaly this morning. The display driver failed so I figured I'd better restart the machine and make sure all was OK. It wasn't.

It wouldn't start up, so I fired it up in Safe Mode. After another iteration of fiddling I identified the culprit: Good ol' rock-solid Web Drive!

I haven't found my software license code for Web Drive and don't want to have to pay for another license unless I absolutely have to, which means Web Drive is running in trial mode. I had it set to start up automatically, which means it loads when the system starts. Since I haven't registered it yet, the auto-nag screen tries to come up.

Unfortunately, Web Drive's auto-nag screen tries to come up before the Windows Vista system is fully loaded, and that causes the machine to stop on a blank screen with the disk spinning. Dang it.

I fixed the problem by resetting Web Drive not to load at startup.

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Hokieman

Greg, recovering the Outlook email isn't hard at all once you can get into the drive. Vista may be a little different than XP but it should be close enough to not matter.

Look in the folder setup under the tools dropdown and check the box in Folder Options View tab to show hidden files.

Then go to to your documents & settings/your user name/local settings/application data/microsoft/outlook directory and look for a file with a pst suffix (the default is outlook.pst). If you were already using personal folders, find the pst files whereever you stashed them and move those as well.

Create a new directory on the hard drive( I call mine Email-Yeah, I know thats really original) and copy the pst file there. You could just overwrite the one on the new drive in the outlook save directory if you want but I wouldn't advise that just in case something goes wrong. Not likely but it could.

Then go into outlook on the new machine and create a personal folder and point it to the pst file(s). Just follow the directions in the email account setup to set up the personal folder (name it whatever you like). Everything should show up and you can move emails between the email save folders as you like.

I do it every once in a while so that the wifes email is on her computer and mine is on mine (we share 1 email account and whoever gets there first downloads it all).

When you're done, just go back and make the hidden files hidden again if you want to but you don't have to.

This worked!

I was successful in getting the license code for WebDrive from my old email. Hooray!

B'b'but... once I got there, it said that my license code had expired and was not valid with the new version of WebDrive, so I had to pay for a new copy anyway!



Oh well. At least I now how all my old email archives.