Sims 3 freezes after 5 minutes

[pianogirlx]

Okay so when I first got the game it worked fine.  I played it for hours and nothing went wrong with it.  This lasted for about a week.

Then one day the screen froze.  I could move the mouse but couldn't click on anything.  I couldn't ctrl+alt+del so I had to turn off my computer completely.  When I turned the computer back it wouldn't let me play the game.  When I clicked on the play button, the message "disc authentication error" came up.  Ugh, that's the same error that comes up and won't let me play the game on my other computer.

Then after shutting off the computer and waiting awhile, it let me play it again.  Except, this time after 5 minutes it froze.  I had to shut off the completely.  When I restarted it, the exact same thing as above happened again.

Now whenever I play, it goes for 5 minutes then freezes.  Help please!  I don't know what to do, this is sooo frustrating.  It seems like a lot of waste of money for a game I only got to play for about 10 hours in total and now it hardly works anymore.  And my computer has more requirements than needed so I know this is not the issue.  There's nothing else loaded on the computer (not even internet) because my grandpa just bought it but then decided he didn't need it so he gave it to me...pleaseee help!

[Cororon]

I think it's a bug, and EA is looking in to it. SimGuruDrea from EA wrote about it on thesims3.com.

"Hi everyone,

We are in the process of researching possible causes of the Disc Authentication Failure errors that some of you are dealing with. While we don’t have one solution that will address everyone’s issue we have discovered a few things that we want to pass along to you. Hopefully this information will enable you to get started playing The Sims 3.

We’ve been able to identify a couple of causes for the Disc Authentication Failure message.

In many of the dxDiag reports we’ve received a specific DVD drive is listed. That drive, MATSHTA DVD-RAM UJ-841S, appears to be common to many users who are getting disc failure messages. This drive is also commonly used in Toshiba laptops. It is recommended that you visit the Toshiba or MATSHTA support forums to better understand how to fix this drive.

We will continue to research issues associated with this specific DVD drive and post anything conclusive on The Sims 3 forum.

Another potential cause that we are researching has to do with the existence of software that manages DVD drives. This software provides features such as the ability to drag and drop files directly on to a drive letter for the purposes of burning DVDs. Examples of software that we are aware of that cause problems include Sonic and Roxio and they use DLA (Drive Letter Access) applications. This software is known to cause issues with games and disc authentication.

Below you will find some things you can try if you have this software or something similar on your system.

- In My Computer, right click on the DVD drive letter that you are using to run your game. If you are running Sonic or Roxio you will likely see a ‘DLA’ tab in the properties panel. You should be able to disable the software from this panel. After you disable this software you will need to reboot your system for it to take effect.

- Updating the version of software that is used to access and use your DVD drive may help.

- Uninstalling the DLA software completely may help.

- DLA appears to be specific to Sonic and Roxio. Other DVD management software may be doing something similar and the steps above may apply to those applications as well.

This is what we know so far. We will update the forum as we learn more."