Some time ago, I mentioned I made a batch file to automatically clear out the cache files before launching the game. Although I posted it, I thought I'd make a tutorial.

1. backup your save folder first! Batch files can be pretty touchy. Some years ago I accidentally deleted an entire folder with one. We don't want that to happen.

2. Navigate to your save folder. It should look something like

although the path will be different for the UC.

3. Open Notepad (or your text editor of choice). Go to File > Save, and navigate to the save folder. Select "All files" under 'save as type' and name it Sims2Start.bat. The important thing is the .bat extension, as this tells the OS that it's a batch file.

4. Add these three lines to the batch file, editing the paths as necessary.



This tells the batch file to delete these two cache files.

5. Find the folder for your latest EP. Normally, it's under Program Files/Program Files (x86) but I don't use the standard path. Mine is:


A good way to do this is to go to your desktop shortcut, right click it, click Properties, and check the "Target" box under the shortcut tab.

6. Add this line to the batch file, changing it to the executable path:



This tells the batch file to launch the executable. If you play in windowed mode, just add -w to the end of this. (For some reason, the batch file won't work properly without those two spare quotation marks.)

7. Test the batch file. Make sure it works properly.

8. Once it's working, you can replace your shortcut with it. Remember what I said earlier about the desktop shortcut properties? Just take the path to your batch file:



and paste it into that target box. If there's anything under the 'Start In' box just delete it.

Now you won't have to worry about remembering to clear the cache files.

Any questions? Ask below.

Nifty. I actually wrote a couple batch files to clear out my caches, both Sims 2 and Sims 3 (they're separate from each other, of course). For my Sims 2 cache clearer, I actually condensed step 4 into one line:...which tells the batch file to cycle through "Groups.cache", "cigen.package", "ContentRegistry", and "Accessory.cache", checking for the existence of each file, and deleting each one that does exist.

Users of multicore systems may also want to change the last line in the batch file (the one that launches the game) to read (adapted from advice in "TS2 and Multicores"):This tells it to start the game with only one CPU core allocated, which can help alleviate minipauses and jerkiness. (NOTE: This won't help at all with single-core systems, and players with the game installed on a SSD may not need this.)

EDIT: Turns out I goofed up on the line to launch the game, in that last block. Herp, and furthermore, derp. Fixed.

As we're sharing ...

My startup batch file uses the command line that comes with WinRAR to backup my custom hood (N004) before it starts the game (Bon Voyage in my case)
Backups are created as N004_YYYYMMDD_HHMM.rar



Note: It was written for Windows XP, you'll need to tweak it for later versions where "My Documents" is just "Documents"