THE SHORT VERSION
Do you like shelling out your hard-earned money for products that are broken, only to find the outsourced customer service department isn’t going to help you and just runs you in circles pounding friendly-sand up your butt? OK, if you LIKE that sort of thing, buy an EA Games product. Otherwise, JUST SAY NO TO EA GAMES.
THE LONG VERSION
We bought The Sims 3 – for a system trunning XP, it has 3GB of RAM, a Radeon 4350 (pixel shading 4.1, 512MB RAM), on a 2.9Ghx Athalon X2 245. That is more than enough juice to run this game. All drivers up to date, BIOS up to date, and even with every service possible stopped and every non-critical process stopped, the game won’t run. I ran the EA game troubleshooter and sent the file to EA view their help system. It has been a month, and they still won’t answer our original question…
First, they started by ignoring the question for almost a week
Second, after sitting in a queue for 30 minutes, I gave them the ticket # and they told us to do all the stuff we already had. Then they asked for a DXDiag report. I sent that.
Third, they opened a SECOND ticket, and in the first ticket they replied “it looks like you have 2 tickets, you need to close one.” I kid you not. This REALLY happened. THAT was supposed to be their response!
Fourth, I threaten them with a charge back and demanded a response. They replied the next day asking us to do all the things they’ve already asked us to do (and I had already tried before). I reply, highly frustrated and ask them:
We've done all that (your link is wrong, fyi - the XP and 2000 list of services are reversed).
The game has never played. The farthest it gets is requesting us to select a neighborhood. After clicking the neighborhood, it loads for a few seconds, then hangs for a few seconds, then the GUI disappears without an error.
* Is there a log file we can send you?
* Did you see anything in the files you've asked us to send (direct x report, or ea game report)?
* Are there any known issues with iPhone, or other specific devices conflicting with the game?
* Are there any known issues with our graphics card (ASUS/Radeon EAH-4350 which supports Pixel Shader ver 4.1 and has 512MB RAM)?
Fifth, I tried twice, waiting over 30 minutes each time, to do the chat thing again – but magically, at the “6-8 minutes left” marker, the chat would switch to “this chat has been disconnected.”
Sixth, they ignore me, so I flame them, tell them I am doing a charge back and announcing to the world how horrible they are. I am making good on that with this post!