It might be a bit irrelevant but still yet related. If you updated to the latest windows 11 build (25h2) and you had your power plan set to ultra performance you'll experience slowdowns and potential crashing in not just TS2 only, but in every other game as a whole. There is a fix if you suffer from this, and that is to edit your power plan and set maximum CPU power to 98% and minimum to 97% this will stop the lag and prevent your CPU from working overtime for seemingly no reason.

For the last month I had been unable to play because of this issue, the game would drop to low 5 fps every 5 seconds even though I know I can do solid 60 fps on this build. I had scoured the internet for fixes only to find none that worked. Until I took a deep look at the power plan settings and realized Microshit decided to override the set power plan settings I had and changed the settings to 100% power and this caused overheating and severe bottlenecking. Potentially taking 2/3 years of life off my PC. Microshit basically, without my permission, changed the setting from the original 98% value to 100% with the ultra power plans in the latest update and I let you all know so you don't burn out your PC and can play TS2/other games properly.


Fuck microshit. They're intentionally are making your PC a brick if you use higher power plans. Eco-friendly my ass. Boycott Windows 12.

@Yinepu
Are you okay mate?
Here are some silly pictures to cheer you up.

I heard Father Jack in that picture.

DRINK!
FECK!
GIRLS!

XD

I'm over here, still having issues with Win10
- Lately, the laptop harddrive went from 27 GB left, to 1 gb left to 14 GB left, to 19 GB left, to 4gb left, and so on, and I'm here wondering what's causing it. Turns out it's likely a mix of the hibernation process gone awry + the Win11 "upgrade" wanting to run (it stabilized the second time I said no to the update, plus turning off and on hibernation to reset the file, and increasing hibernation to "after 2 hours" instead of one in the power plan, so I have a bit more time).
- The laptop kept spending 5-10+ minutes turning off, instead of less than half a minute. Turns out it was because of a bluescreen message that happened after turning off the laptop, at least 2-3 times. Most likely for the othe reasons ^ above. Likely also from having hibernated during that session.

(and yes, I know I have to move/edit/delete files to increase the harddrive space, I just haven't gotten around to it. Need to do another backup first - a long and dreary one...)

Win10 isn't particularly better than Win11, but at least it doesn't have all the extra BS (inbuilt AI, continuous screenshots, ruining harddrives with updates, and whatnots).

(That said, after having been at war with Win10 for 5-6 years now, I thought I had finally found solutions to most of the issues, since the laptop had been stable for some time - but I guess I was wrong. I suspect that final update caused some bugs... It's these things that make me seriously consider Linux, though I'm not sure I'm brave enough to do the switch on my own...)

Interesting system of playing prison time! Makes sense like how it would work in game. Nice work on the uniforms, too. Have you ever thought of sending your sims to court \ trial and how you would play it out in game? I thought perhaps I would send them and their lawyer and victim off to a vacation destination and they would spend the time there doing tasks to make it up to the victim

I'm really loving Windows 11 so far. But- I have the pro version, so natively have access to group policy editor which is an absolute must if you want to properly disable copilot etc. You can enable gpedit in the Home version, but it's fiddly. I spent many years using powershell and GPedit to manage user permissions over domains so I've got to know a few tricks to stop windows from doing all of the things you don't want it to. Mac was always a whole lot simpler, Linux too!

Back in September I downloaded and installed a Sleep with Any Sim mod by Squinge. It allows Sims to share a double bed (for sleeping -- not for woohoo!) regardless of how bad their relationship is. I thought it might be useful in a few lots in my game where unrelated Sims occasionally have to share a bed. (At one time, at least until early in the 20th century, working men used to expected to share a bed when staying in lodgings. The old Tyneside song Keep yor feet still Geordie hinny is about two men in such a situation.) To be honest the mod is rarely needed in my game, since most of the Sims, who have to share a bed in my game, are at least friends. So until now the mod hasn't made much difference.

However I was a little surprised when playing Irene Molloy and her teenage daughter Cora, when Cora autonomously chose to sleep in bed with her mother, despite there being another bedroom with an unused single bed. Under any normal conditions, I would have expected any teenager, given the choice, to choose to sleep in a bed of their own, rather than sleep with their mum. (In very extreme and traumatic circumstances, like trying to sleep through a bombing raid, I could understand it, if they chose to revert to more childlike behaviour.) So I couldn't help wondering if Squinge's mod might be influencing Cora's choice. Now Cora and her mum are friends, so, even in an unmodded game, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't object to sharing with her mum if I asked her to, but I'm still surprised that she autonomously makes that choice.

Another thought occurred to me coming home from church this morning. Today in the UK is Mothering Sunday, or "Mothers Day" as it's more often called today. On this day they used to give little posies of flowers to mothers in the congregation, but then they started giving them to all the women, and now they give them to everybody, regardless of age or sex. So as I came home from church on the 'bus, I was carrying a tiny Mothers Day posy of flowers. This got me to thinking that Cora's behaviour was maybe just her unusual way of expressing her love for and appreciation of her mum.

Maybe it was sim Mother's Day too (even though it's not until May here).

Honestly, I think that is the biggest problem with windows. Instead of putting everything in a user-friendly GUI and detail explaining what settings to do what exactly, they hide 70 percent of the features and settings behind command prompt, and the ones they do show on the UI only vaguely describe what they actually do and half the time don't even change/fix anything substantial.

I had to dig through 4 sets of menus just to find the power plan settings for "CPU power management" so I could correct their fuck up.

...Windows has become an anti-user-friendly OS full of bloatware apps and services, useless AI, and messy and buggy legacy code. None which seem to talk well with each other. I mean Windows has always been a shit show, but W11 is the epitome of a shit show.

Go straight to control panel for settings to bypass the bolted-on simplified interface. What version of Win 11 are you using?

The legacy code is the best part of Windows. It is the stuff made by the new generation that is inefficient. Today's flat design GUI is sparse with big text, and options are often presented in a list format, which doesn't aid in recalling where the option was. Windows always has had hidden settings though, which is where various tweaking applications came in, like TweaUI, TweakALL and TCP Optimizer.

I think I remember back in the XP days using a program that allowed me to customize the start menu, which was only possible due to some kind of 'hidden feature'. And that's actually part of my point. I shouldn't need to use external programs to tweak settings that should otherwise be listed on the user interface. Unless it's some sort of half-working dev debug feature, then I see no reason to hide things from me. Things that, mind you, I paid a sizeable chunk of change to have.



Control Panel is part of the GUI bit I mentioned. Control Panel is clunky and antiquated. While it may suffice to get the job done, it really could use an overhaul. Reorganize the menus, explain what things do in detail, change those god-awful cartoony icons, etc.

...And it's another one of those things that's hidden. You have to literally use the search feature to find it. Can't just right click the windows icon and go to it... no... that'd be too easy.

They HAVE overhauled control panel- since win 8 or Server 2012 they implemented the settings app. It isn't intended to be seen by your average user, hence it's not really changed much since earlier windows versions. What exactly is it that you want to do? You might be able to do it through registry or group policy, which is why I was asking about your Windows version. In my experience your average user doesn't know much about computers apart from playing music or surfing the internet, so giving them easy access to things that might stop a computer working is a bad idea! Hence they dumbed the interface down and made it more difficult for something very bad to happen. Windows is after all designed for easy use by all, and whole books used to be written showing people how to use control panel.

You say that Control Panel is "antiquated" but not precisely what makes it bad in your view. Reorganization and overhaul for the sake of it are undesirable. Big corporations do it all the time, as they release new models, and you associate this with good progress. But it isn't. If buttons get moved around, I have to waste time finding them again.

Making organized dialogs is a lost art. These days you at best get a flat list of options that can only searched through, miliar to about config in web browsers. I remember the opinion that making dialogs is tedious and developers don't want to do it.

What has made the control panel a bit "clunky" is that since Windows Vista they broke it up into individual pages accessible by searching. Previously you had a System applet with several tabs, and Display Properties with several tabs, and Mouse and so on. It may not have been the best organiation but it was something I could remember. Say I know it was under Display, bottom left. I can click through all the tabs and find what I need. Then they made it so that you had to use the Web View, click a few blue hyperlinks, and get a dialog on diet with just one page, and the others had to be brought up a similar way separately.

Microsoft also intentionally stopped the TweakUI project because it gave too much power to poeple or something like that.

I don't know if it was Microsoft, OMEN Gaming Hub, or what, but I had a bad update that messed with fan speeds. The fans would be at the lowest speed, barely going, even when gaming. I know Sims 3 is said to be a CPU-intensive program, but there is no reason a gaming laptop with decent specs should have internal temps of 90°C from just running a 32-bit program 10-15 years older than it.
...Actually, even before having fan specs borked for a while, I thought it ran hotter than need be. I've since disabled TurboBoost and set maximum CPU usage to 99% in an effort to make things less 'fires of Mount Doom'. I think that was about a 20-degree difference.

I used to like Windows (with the exception of 8, which was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea), but lately it just annoys me. Every big tech company annoys me these days, it seems. My kingdom for a world without gen-AI and companies trying to take everyone's personal info 'for the greater good'. Lately I fantasize about the past because it seemed like a simpler time. Of course, the time I keep thinking about was also when I was a naive little kid, so I may be biased.
Giant manuals for Control Panel... Reminds me of going to book sales at my local library, and seeing humongous user manuals for old computer programs. Fifty thousand pages on Microsoft Word...
I was telling my friend the other day, "You know, I don't have much experience with Linux, other than that one computer we always had trouble with. But with all the stuff going on these days, Linux is a tempting idea." They say the grass is always greener on the other side, but companies like Microsoft are doing a thorough job of making their grass look brown, and I'd like to get away from the dead grass and prickly weeds.

Uh... Sims 2 Random Thoughts. What can I say about Sims 2...
Myshuno, am I right?

I just noticed how Sims 2 is one of my comfort games - especially now when I have (still, *sigh*) this whole bunch of medical crap going on and I feel like my brain has been fried.
Playing Sims 2 is not only a good distraction from it, but it's also really calming and cozy to me. No matter if I'm actually playing in-game, building or looking for CC outside of the game.

I wish I could just plug and play Sims 2 on my little Ubuntu . . . actually, I don't, because it's one of those little ultrathin laptops and it would die. (It came with Windows 8, so you understand why it got Linuxed.) But it just does the things.

Except for when it doesn't just do the things.

The current thing is that Firefox does not recognize either the keyboard or the touchscreen keyboard, after an update a couple days ago. Just Firefox. Only Firefox. Every other program is fine.
So for the handful of websites that refuse to work with Pale Moon, I have to type in Libreoffice, copy, paste into the browser. So. Annoying.

However, if Sims 2 were plug and play with Ubuntu, I'd be seriously tempted to upgrade my old Windows 7 box and run Ubuntu for gaming. Watching my husband and kids try to get 10 and 11 not be stupid with basic functions has convinced me I never, ever, ever want to deal with those OS. The Ubuntu people tend to call things what I think they ought to be called and put them where I think they reasonably ought to be located, so it's far more intuitive than Windows for me. (Any Windows. My computer life started with Apple IIe, then went to Windows 3.11, so it's weird that my brain likes Ubuntu, but there you go.)

I've come to the decision that none of my families are allowed to have more than four children. So far every family I've played with that has four kids inevitably has at least 2 (in some cases all!) of the kids end up failing high school. Perhaps it's because my ACR babies are all born back-to-back so the poor parents don't have time to manage all the kids plus hold down jobs. There always seems to be one kid starving, one picking on their siblings and becoming enemies with everyone, and one constantly crying because their aspiration is low. The eldest child is the only one that ever graduates with decent grades and skill points, and even then they struggle trying to help the parents manage all the other children! Three children is difficult enough, but I really feel badly about the poor parents who end up losing their jobs or passing out from being in a bad mood after a busy day/week/year wrangling their kids. Is it possible to have parental guilt by proxy?

I've had NASA's live coverage of Artemis II flying around the moon today playing in the background all day and just out of curiosity I went and looked at my old Apollo 11 Sims lots... and no big surprise, this week is the most attention they've gotten in the full 6 month window I can view lol! 🌔🚀

Time for a new one!

Huh. One of the first things I do - besides yanking OneDrive out by it's guts - is stick a shortcut to the ControlPanel down in my "task bar".
Both my lappy and desktop are high-end gaming computers. W11. And 2 years old-ish.

Now... there was an update a few weeks ago, that has nerfed my battery power on my lappy. Even turning the power options down, and graphics, etc. it still revs like crazy even with the basic (no rpc+) TS2 UC. So, I don't know what's up with that.

I left click the Windows icon and scroll down. It's under Windows System.