Sims2 Sims 2 Download Limits

Defragging *before* a setup helps the setup. But a defrag *after* the setup is good to clean up the mess that the setup made. Which helps the game run.

When I'm in a Simming state of mind, I tend to play a LOT. And because the game itself makes an awful mess of any harddisk, I believe in defragging at the end of each simming day. This is also a big part of why my game runs so smoothly.
One may think that this is excessive, and that it will waste a lot of time for little gain. But that is far from the truth. The longer you delay defragging, the more complicated and wide-spread the fragmentation becomes, and therefor the longer the defrag session takes each time.
Especially when I have the Simming bug, if I defrag only once a month, the clean-up session can easily take several hours. When I defrag once every week, it takes about half an hour per session. But when I defrag at the end of each day, it's usually done in about two minutes. That makes for a total of one hour for the whole month!! So it really pays off.

It makes me nervous to get a new computer. If I ever want to play quad core games like Dragon Age-which I own but can't run on my dual core, I have to get a quad core and new pieces for it, but what then if this stuff starts happening with my downloads. Most of my downloads are not compressed, I've never done any kind of work around, I just shove it all in and it works. I'd go mad with a 2gb limit, that's nothing I'd have more then that simply on my sims heads. My medieval game has no maxis stuff visible at all, I use every bit of that 10GB.

As I said earlier, Jo, the newer machines should not be hindered by such limits. You would, however, run into other issues. Because if there is one thing you can depend upon, it is for MicroSoft to change stuff in such a way that games which ran perfectly well on older versions of windows, are suddenly almost impossible to install or to get to behave on the newer version of Windows which is bound to be packaged with any new computer.

Windows is meant to make computing accessible to the masses. Alas, it doesn't always work that way, though.

I'm intrigued by the pattern I think I see with your crashes. It looks to me like when you have any combination of your old downloads and the new ones in, your game crashes, but when you remove any one of your old folders, you are fine. I am thinking this might either be a hard download limit, or it might be something in your old folders. I know, superficially it looks like no particular file is to blame because you get the same results with different folders, but I'd say go on a binary hunt anyway. But focus on the odl folders and leave the new folder alone for now.