{"id":69,"date":"2009-01-05T23:29:10","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T03:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/?p=69"},"modified":"2010-05-06T10:45:55","modified_gmt":"2010-05-06T14:45:55","slug":"sims2-on-a-dell-inspiron-1525-vista-video-crash-bang-boom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/sims2-on-a-dell-inspiron-1525-vista-video-crash-bang-boom\/","title":{"rendered":"Sims2 Fix on a Dell Inspiron 1525 vista video crash bang boom."},"content":{"rendered":"

So let’s say that you’re my wife and you like to play the Sims. The Sims 2 in fact with a fair few expansions. Let’s say that your geek husband bought you a shiny new vista running dell inspiron 1525 and loaded up your transfered settings, neighborhoods and all and sure it loads the Sims, but it just won’t play. black screens that go nowhere, sound but no video, all of these can happen.<\/p>\n

Let’s fix it shall we?<\/p>\n

Dell’s drivers for the Intel 965 Chipset family are junk. We have had this computer for over 6 months now and they’ve done nothing to improve my opinion on this count. So what to do? ROLLBACK. And rollback to a nice old school HP driver to boot.<\/p>\n

Go to one of these:
\ndriver choice #1<\/span> apparently choice 1 is no longer working, so we’ll just strike it.
\ndriver choice #2<\/a><\/p>\n

Either should work just fine, the key is to find one of the drivers with Version: 7.14.10.1318 A.
\nDownload the .exe and run it. It should extract the files to C:\\swsetup. You’ll need to know this.<\/p>\n

You can run the program from there, but it won’t help you, it’s HP specific. So what to do? Now that it’s extracted those drivers and such, let’s go to the device manager. You can right-click on ‘computer’ in the start pearl and click on ‘manage’ to get there. ‘Device Manager’ will be a choice on the left column. From there, expand the ‘Display Adapters’ and double click on your Intel 965 to bring up it’s properties.<\/p>\n

Click on the ‘Driver’ tab and do the unthinkable. Uninstall it. Completely.<\/p>\n

If your screen doesn’t just go black and freak you out, skip ahead a paragraph. If your screen is black and you’re freaking out. Restart the machine. It will load a simple VGA driver and you’ll see things crazy big,but it’ll be just fine. Navigate your way back to that miracle place where you uninstalled the driver, because we’re about to install a fresh proper one that is totally Sim-able.<\/p>\n

Click on the ‘Update Driver…’ button and choose the ‘Browse my computer…’ choice, the hit the ‘Browse…’ button on the next page and navigate to that folder, C:\\swsetup, make sure that ‘include subfolders’ is checked and bang on that ‘next’ button at the bottom.<\/p>\n

It will now search out and install the older driver. Don’t be afraid if it goes black again after it completes, a restart will have you back in business. Mind you, you might have to adjust your screen resolution once you’ve restarted again, but that’s a small price to pay to be able to play the Sims again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So let’s say that you’re my wife and you like to play the Sims. The Sims 2 in fact with a fair few expansions. Let’s say that your geek husband bought you a shiny new vista running dell inspiron 1525 and loaded up your transfered settings, neighborhoods and all and sure it loads the Sims, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[38,33,37,44,42,40,34,41,43,35,36,45,32,31,39,18],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fixed","tag-38","tag-33","tag-37","tag-black","tag-chipset","tag-crash","tag-dell","tag-driver","tag-fix","tag-inspiron","tag-intel","tag-screen","tag-sims","tag-sims2","tag-video","tag-vista"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181,"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vermontgeeks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}