Slice of Chaotic Life

With the Black Beast rebooting randomly and the reserve being a Windows Vista machine that has a challenge playing Sims 2, it seemed a good time to get a laptop again. The old ones are broken or outdated, although I am sure children in Africa would be thankful for the newest of them. Well, some children in Africa. Not all parts of Africa, I suspect.

Anyway, Asus N56V.  It is pretty good, although it doesn’t have a SSD but an old, slow hard disk. Having 6 GB of RAM helps, though. This is particularly nice for Sims 3, which needs a lot of RAM to run large neighborhoods. It can use the hard disk (or SSD) as “paged memory” or “virtual memory”, and with SSD the speed of this is actually acceptable. But there is a weak link when saving games, where it only uses physical memory. When I have played a neighborhood long enough (longer the smaller it is), the game runs into this limit and crashes with an Error 12 instead of saving. Saving frequently seems to help for a while, but after a couple more days the neighborhood is lost forever. You can still export your favorite families from the game and import them in another neighborhood, and they will keep their stuff, but all their friends and history will be lost. So, more RAM is good. Probably, unless there is something else to mess things up.