*pops in-game to quickly take a look at some worn-looking floor tiles I made for some new homes*

*gets distracted and instead spends more than an hour building and partially decorating a new post office for a sim couple to run as a business*

*closes out game before remembering about the floors*

Easily distracted pretty much sums up my experience with this game. Sad thing is my game loads in under a minute, and yet I still don't feel like firing it back up to check the floors. Oh, well...maybe on the weekend.

Things I intended to download: Formal dresses for teen females, more seperates for teens (male and female) and bathroom objects.

Things I actually download: HAIRS!!

I've been thinking of uploading my content on simsfileshare here last night. It's been a while since I shared anything here and there's some things I'm still proud of making .

I have 70 clothing items/packages in my Saved Sims folder, that are all meant to go in ONE upload. Sometimes I think, I make too many recolors. lol

...You don't have a lot of cc installed, too, do you?

Mine takes a little over a minute, too, on an old laptop, to the hood load screen. I have 1.56GB in Downloads and I empty my lot bin into a Real Estate hood, which helps once inside the hood.

I have like 4GB of cc and mine also just takes a minute???
And I’m else on a newer computer with windows 10, but I did set it to run a windows 7 compability when I play sims 2. It helped me out a lot! Ah but it’s nice to be able to play after 2 and a half minute (1min loading into game, 1 min into hood, 30 seconds into a family) :D

I just can't stop laughing when sims start dancing the smustle to my slow custom depressing songs.

Aaaahhh, after a whole day of my country's counterpart to SAT, I deserve to play sims for the rest of the day.

While trying to fix your game with the 50/50 method is extremely tedious if your game takes more than five minutes to load, organising your downloads into more than just, say, five folders is so, SO helpful. I even have one called "problematic", so if something is wrong, I look into that one first, and a lot of the time that's where the conflict lies.

I'm rather attached to my current computer too. Though in my case it's more because it's where I first met Andrew and Gloria.

I'm back -- sort of!

PC World fitted a new hard disk, and I restored it from a backed up system image. The trouble is that, as the old hard disk was failing, Windows backup wouldn't make system images any more, and my last good one was from July 2017. However, although it couldn't make system images, Windows backup had still succeeded in backing up most of the files on the computer in October 2018. So I restored from that backup too. Now I was aware back in the autumn that my disk was failing, and I really should have set about replacing it then. But I found that, whenever my computer wouldn't start normally, I could run Windows Startup Repair and/or CHKDSK /R (a command line utility familiar to me from MS-DOS days) and still get it to start, even though I was losing a handful of files with bad clusters. And I'm afraid it led me into a false sense of security, thinking I could always get it to start. Until a fortnight ago, when my computer could no longer see my C: drive as a bootable disk at all. Now (despite what my Sims might tell you) I'm not totally stupid: in addition to Windows Backup, which I knew wasn't working properly, I regularly back up my game to .zip files, which I the copy to DVDs. I have a back up of my whole Sims 2 folder on DVD to 8th January 2019, and a backup of Veronaville, which is the only 'hood I've played recently, to 13th March, only 8 days before my disk finally crashed. So even if nothing can b recovered from the crashed disk, I shouldn't lose too much. (I would lose the 3 Sims I created for the all-female commune I was posting about recently.)

However I have a friend who is good at data recovery, so I am hopeful that with his help, I might get [nearly] everything back. The old disk seemed to be running quite well -- just before it crashed!

I tried making a music replacement with that album I found, and while the songs play perfectly, the text strings still read as the default strings for the replaced song and no matter of editing the text strings from the TSData\Res\Text location seems to change the titles. I'm starting to wonder if they're hardcoded in the .exe (I've seen some other EA games from the that era do this such as NFS:Underground 2) instead and the strings in the TSData\Res\Text\MusicTitles.package are unused. I haven't found any other location with text strings that mention song titles other than said MusicTitles.package.

If you have Spotify you can listen to the album here. Not all of the songs fit due to fleshed-out English lyrics, but half of the album does as it has instrumentals. The first song Bad Charlie sounds the most Sims 4-ish to me, with Irie and Prom Queen being other amazing fits. The song Call 911 sounds exactly like a rock cover of those Steve Jablonsky create-a-sim songs from TS3.

https://open.spotify.com/album/45jp...DT2KG4pTZkb0R3w

I don't know why I have 9GB of cc in my game. And why I still try to build without cc.

Why is "no cc" seen as a virtue in lots? Imo lots with cc are often better, and I love to get new stuff for my game that I wouldn't think of downloading otherwise. As long as it's hassle free (included) I don't see the problem with lots that have lots of cc (no pun intended). But I also don't have a crazy amount of cc already. Maybe that's why.

Maybe because being able to create something beautiful with only Maxis items is an exploit? Custom contents are often prettier than Maxis original content. I personally don't think that way, but this is the only reasonable reason I can think of. And I agree with you. As long as hassle free is included, all is well.

Personally, because I don't want to suddenly have tons of CC (that might not even fit my taste) in my game only because I installed a house.

That's why I never download any lot with CC and why I'm very thankful to any creator who uploads lots without CC.
As soon as I see a huge list of "CC (included)" in a download thread, I close it.

I can of course understand and accept that some people want to build the exact house they are envisioning and need "exactly that CC floor" for it, but it just makes me personally not want to download it.

You are aware that you don't need to suddenly have tons of CC that you might not like just to get a house right?
This is why The Sims2 Clean Installer is awesome.

I have CC limits in a lot, including my own uploads. I'll go up to a dozen; two dozen with recolors. Some CC really is nice, and I don't mind it in my game. But I'm getting to the point where I don't want dozens and dozens and dozens of CC items in my folders anymore. It was nice when I had less than a GB, but I now have quite a bit of CC, and am pretty picky by now.

I have downloaded a CC-heavier lot and picked only a couple of things I really wanted. However, the frame or layout of the building has to be really special for me to do that.

I tend to go for CC-free lots because even when the CC is included it's a hassle. Sometimes, the files aren't clearly named and that means having to figure out "Is this a floor? Is it a wallpaper? Is it a curtain?" and renaming it. Then when everything is named clearly, I have to sift it into the appropriate subfolder and hope I don't lose any along the way. And hope I didn't just end up with duplicates I'll have to weed out because the person decided to name the files slightly differently from the last time.

Haha yeah good point! Though my downloads folder is already pretty disorganized so some more disorganization isn't a deal breaker for me
And there are programs you can use to find duplicates. Clean Installer also checks for duplicates before installing the files. Not sure it works if the files are renamed though. Hence why you use duplicate finders.
(Personally I haven't bothered with that, I haven't noticed a problem so I just don't care about duplicates, but I know it exists if I need to in the future.)

I thought that doesn't work with the UC?

Are you telling me that everyone with UC cannot use this program anymore? Oh my..this is terrible. I did not know!!!?

I sort all my cc by creator into folders. So if it comes with a lot I have to spend time figuring out who made it, where it goes, etc, after Clean Installer dumps it loose in my downloads folder. Since people name files . . . interestingly . . . it's much nicer to have them come in as a cc download to be put in by creator.

Makes it easier to identify updates to replace old files, find cc when someone asks for something I've got they'd like to have, or change an old mod that does something for a new mod that does the same thing better.

No, no, Clean Installer works fine with UC. I use it all the time.

With lots, I initially dump all CC in a separate folder. Since I don't go for long lists of CC, either in my uploads or downloads, it's easier for me to pick out the culprit. I then sort everything into categories (floors, walls, etc. ) later. First, though, if I have more than a few items, I'll do a quick run through Clean Installer and if I come across a duplicate, I'll get rid of the copy in the new folder. Clean Installer is a HUGE help.