Black screen crash on start-up. [SOLVED]

Ok so I've been looking for the past few days now for a fix on this. I installed the base game from my CD I have here, and I downloaded The Sims 3 Pets, and Supernatural from you guys since Steam wouldn't let me refund my other games so I could buy the expansions there, and they wanted me to re-buy the base game from them to install the add-ons. Anyway, after having downloaded them, and gone through all the steps in the install thread, I still seem to be running into problems with the game.

At first the game ran on full screen, worked fine... loaded it up and got to the screen where you select your neighborhood... Well the game ended up asking me to put in the supernatural disc... I obviously didn't have it, so I figured I did something wrong, I looked up the problem and re-did the steps, patching, applying the fix etc only for it to give me the serialization error... I think that's what it was called anyway....

So I ended up uninstalling/re-installing everything. Well now it works, but there's only one problem any time I go to full screen, the game will crash to a black screen (regardless of what point I am in the game) and my keyboard will become unresponsive, so ctrl/alt/del is out of the question. On top of that, I know my computer isn't the greatest spec wise, but canyourunit tells me I can run the Sims at max detail and run fine, I'm not THAT presumptuous though and I still end up running with medium settings, the problem is for some odd reason there is a huge drop in framerate. Even at the lowest settings, the framerate is just horrid. 

It might be because I'm running it in windowed mode, but I'm not certain. It's frustrating because I know my computer can do better than that, and it has done better than that before. Only reason I'm posting about this is because after searching, I haven't really found anyone that is having trouble with their keyboard being unresponsive, as well as still being able to alt-tab out of it. If I end up hitting the black screen then it's going to turn into a hard reset for the computer.

I have done as you instructed, and unfortunately my game is still experiencing a really hard fps drop (around 7 fps) and it makes playing really unbearable. I don't mind having to play windowed mode, mainly because I don't want to risk running full screen and having the entire thing freeze again. I've had to hard reset the computer about five times this week because of it, and that can't be healthy for it. I just want the game to run smoother than it is currently really. I wouldn't really suggest that the installation has anything to do with it...However I have the specs for the game, and I used to be able to run the base game flawlessly, so I'm not sure really...

I used to use the no-cd mod since I lost the base game's CD a few months back and just recently found it.... and I had some others installed as well, but I had removed them from the documents folder awhile back because I figured since I was downloading a new patch and everything that they wouldn't be compatible, and I didn't feel like updating them since I never really used them anyway. 

I didn't delete the folder completely however, Just moved it to the desktop. Mainly to keep track of what mods I had just in-case I did want to update them sometime. I'm not very computer savvy when it comes to how files are read, so I'm not sure if having that folder on the desktop would create a problem for the game since it's the actual folder and not a shortcut. Otherwise, I don't have any mods that I'm aware of installed.

Edit: Oh my bad, no I've never really downloaded custom content. I might've in the past I think but I'm pretty sure those files are long gone.

Shamrock wrote:Hello,
Anyway, putting the folder on the desktop prevents your game from reading it.
Have you tried to run the game with Game Booster?

Yeah, I installed it back in 2011 so I could run it alongside league of legends, so now I run the majority of my games on gamebooster. I don't really notice a difference in performance framewise/gameplay wise, however it is nice to be able to shut off unneeded processes so it doesn't end up giving my processor more work to deal with.

Hah, it worked! Thanks a lot! I haven't tried full screen but it did fix the frame issues. It modified the registry so it might've fixed the full screen problem as well, although still working up the nerve to try that one again.

No that'd be it! Thanks a lot! Everyone's help in my problem was greatly appreciated. You may mark this as solved.

//SOLVED
//LOCKED
Shamrock