My friend recently purchased the Sims 3, University, pets and paradise island. She installed all of the games/exp.packs etc... played it several times and has had no issues until Last night and she asked if I could help her solve her problem and sadly I can not.

Problem: Game won't save. It looks as though it is saving, but doesn't actually do anything. She used "save and quit" when she was done last night and went to bed. When she awoke today the game was still sitting there "saving" ( Says saving and the little thing is swirling around the plumbob). She used the Task manager to kill the game, restarted computer, cleaned cache, and restarted the game. Game loaded, she commanded them to move around etc... used the buy feature and the build feature, everything looked great so she attempted to save right away just to see if it would and it did not. She again killed the game via taskmanager restarted etc... made new family, different town (was originally in Isle, now in appaloosa) and immediately attempted to save, again it was a no go. Each time she is allowing it to sit for 15 - 20 minutes to give it ample time to finish saving before killing it. I had her check her ea folders for any files that say bad and she found none.

This is what I can tell you

1) No internet so no updates, mods, or custom content; plays directly from her disc
2) uses testing cheat for motives only, but uses moveobjects command when needed and immediately turns it off when she's done with it. She has never used buydebug (didn't even know what that was when I asked).
3) computer she uses is brand new has Windows 8.1 and is powerful (specs are more than required)
and according to what it shows her in task manager, Sims 3 is using 23% of memory at any given time, highest ever seen was 23.7%

Any help is greatly appreciated. She is pretty much bed ridden and doesn't have much to do so I thought the Sims 3 would help occupy her time but I fear I have brought her more frustration than she needs right now

This happens to me when I've been playing too long in one session. "Too long" is a subjective amount of time. If I've been doing a lot and not saving, three hours is too long (I shouldn 't play that long anyway). If the game gets minimized a lot, and especially if it gets saved a lot, I have a much longer time before it does that.

I thought that may be the problem with her too so I suggested she restart the game and try to create the new family and a new world to see if that was the problem. To be sure everything was completely closed she restarted the computer, not just the game, and chose random people for a family and tried to save immediately after she arrived at her plot of land (i say that because she didn't purchase or build a house and she didn't try to enter a pre-made family) It still won't save. She said "the game plays just fine and sims act completely simish". She was a huge fan of Sims 2 but she no longer has any of those games and due to not having the internet she can't just download them from origin. I kinda wish I hadn't told her to go for Sims 3 and just let her re-purchase the Sims 2 games

I can understand her frustration for sure! I wouldn't want to play the game for an hour only to have to start all over again each time i want to play. Kind of defeats the purpose of The Sims lol

She moved the folder to the desktop and started the game. Everything loaded fine but still won't save.

she now wants to know if she can delete the folder on her desktop since it created a new one? she would also like to know if there is something I can download and put on a jumpdrive and take over to her and finally would it be wise to uninstall and re-install all her games? I told her to hold off on the last thing until I hear back from someone because I think that should be a last resort.


EDIT: After moving the folder to the desktop the original game file is what she loaded to test it (where the problem all started). She started the game again to try to start a new world after moving the user folder to her desktop and she said all her old family files are gone??? There is nothing to there at all, as if she hasn't ever played the game before.

Thank you for your help. She did all of those things that you asked. The "clean run" didn't fix the problem. She said she is going to uninstall and try again. She said on an up-note she has always loved manually cleaning her registry so she gets to occupy her time with that lol She is going to install again and give it a try. Thanks again for all the help you guys provided and I hope that these things will work for someone else in the future!!!! I know I learned a few things along the way!