I haven't played Sims 3 in about a year, but now I have spent two hours trying to get my game to load. It used to run just fine, but this time I press play on the launcher and it opens up to a black screen that doesn't go anywhere. The mouse moved but the screen was just black. After about five minutes of nothing, I press the home button to minimize the the window. The game closes and an error message pops up-"Unable to start game Service initialization failed (0x065d0274) . First I updated my game (1.67.2) because I thought it would make everything better. It didn't, the same thing happened. So I go to google. I found tutorials here and followed them to the best of my ability. I have never downloaded mods or anything off the internet to my game besides the patches. So now, with my cashes cleared, the same thing is still happening. I tried the third step, which is to rename the entire Sims 3 folder, and the launcher won't launch anything. I changed the name back, and it did its black screen-error message again. The cashe folders haven't appeared again.
This computer has Windows 7, but it is a fairly old computer. I spent hundreds of dollars of my own money on this game as a 10-11 year and I really want this game to work. Any suggestions of things that might help would be greatly appreciated. I might not get to try them out right away as this is my dad's computer and he's always on it, but I will try anything. Thank you!