File this one under total weirdness. I went out and bought The Sims 3 as a celebration for getting a job; I have been a fan of Sims games since the beginning. Mostly I don't play the game a lot. I enjoy designing the houses and living spaces and then watching the people mill around in their perfect little word, filled with resources, like it's a digital ant farm or aquarium--very soothing.
When I bought the game, I tried to install it on my desktop that evening after spending all day backing up my laptop. Mr. Borealis had been on me for a while to let him upgrade the system on my Dell Studio 15 from Vista to Win7, so I figured I wanted this done before installing my new game. The problem was, while Mr. B worked on formatting my laptop and installing the new OS, I could not get Sims 3 to install on my Desktop due to a recurrent CRC error that stated the .exe file on the disk did not match the .cab file, and that the disk must be corrupted, and to contact the software vendor.
I started looking online to find that many, many unfortunate game owners have had this problem, and EA Games either can't or won't fix it satisfactorily with a patch. Their offered solution is to defrag your disk (which, let's face it, never works), to check for system updates, etc., etc.--"It must be user error, because we here at EA Games are gods." There were more helpful solutions online from other users, and after trying it the EA Games way and failing to install 5 times, I was willing to try everything. I tried installing as admin, popping the disc in and out repeatedly, clicking to ignore the error (resulted in a disk authentication error), copying the disk to the hard drive and attempting install from there--all to no avail.
Eventually, I begain to notice that the .exe file it was complaining about was not for the game itself, but for the EA Media Downloader. So when the disc complained again, I opened up the install file and just deleted the contents of the Media Downloader folder because I hadn't planned to spend more money online. I just wanted to play the game I had payed $50 to play. TADA!!!! After deleting that file, the game installs and plays perfectly.
Oddly enough, the game produced no errors when I tried to install it on my laptop. Both machines were running Win7 at the time of installation, and both had well above the game requirements. Several other users in online forums have reported similar anomalies, where the game seems to "like" certain machines and "not like" others for no apparent reason.
EA, get your act together. Based on the input I read from other highly dissatisfied customers, your inability to patch this has led others to give the game horrible reviews, alter the game in ways that has affected the game performance to get it to even play, and even pirate the game to get what they paid for. Is this the type of press you really want?
Alula
6 comments:
That sounds like something they should have had corrected weeks after the game was released; At the very least they should have clear installation instructions available on their website.
See, that's the really annoying thing. The solution they offered online was to copy the disk to the computer and install from there (and defrag, update, etc). Or to send in your disk and get a replacement disk. Their solution doesn't work for at least some of the people out there, and there are a lot of reported cases where getting a new disk resulted in the exact same errors.
See the forum here (the higher number pages are the most recent): http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/947.page
Here is there page of proposed solutions (none of which worked for me): http://help.thesims.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/55
Notice at the top of that last page: "14 of 123 people found this answer helpful".
I'm trying to install The sims 3 on a friend's computer and this error is getting me on nerves. Again, what's the paste you delete?
@_Yuu: What I ended up doing was copying the install disc to my hard drive, and then going in to the install file that was copied over onto my machine (obviously, you won't be able to delete the contents of anything directly on the install disc). In the install files on my computer, I located the file that the error was referencing: something in the Media Downloader file. I made a choice that I probably wouldn't be downloading much, and deleted the contents of that file (not the file itself--I just left it as an empty file).
That worked for me. However, note that a lot of different things have worked for people, depending on the error you get or your computer. Things that worked for other people did not work for me.
I wish you the best luck in getting the program installed and working! Nothing is worse than paying so much for a game that you then can't play.
I can't even find the EA MEDIA DOWNLOADER file... this is soo frustrating. Ive tried everything.
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