Neighbourhood dissapears

[Thanos]

I have checked the many FAQs that mentioned something like this, but none applied for my case, so here it goes

I have the game installed, with University. My computer is Pentium III, 320 MB of RAM, Windows ME, Nvidia Geforce 4 graphic card, more or less 3 GB of free space in the hard disk. The performance goes well enough

The problem is that if I play this game for too long, more or less an hour, then the neighbourhood gets corrupted, and the next time I load the game it's no longer there. It's said to be a problem of bad Simpe editing, but I haven't needed to use it for ages. I have seen a way to reset a neighbourhood, but it's a custom one, not a default one. I haven't added anything new, no hacks, no objects, no lots, etc.

At least I have found out about the time thing. As I said, if I play for more than an hour (no matter exactly doing what: creating sims, building, playing families at either neighbourhood or campus, etc), then the neighbourhoods gets corrupted and I have to place the back up, but if I leave the game in time nothing happens. However, I don't like playing checking the time, so if someone knows how to fix this...

[Swordwolf]

<more or less 3 GB of free space in the hard disk.>

That is not much room. It sounds as if your Windows swap file (or page file) is running out of room and can't dynamically expand properly when it needs to, such as when playing TS2. The longer you play, the worse it becomes. This could be the cause of the corruption you are seeing. Try doing a Checkdisk, Cleanup, and then a Defrag. This will only delay the inevitable for a short time. The HDD is simply out of enough free space to allow the OS to run properly. You might soon begin to see out of memory errors.

[Thanos]

How much space would be ideal?

[Swordwolf]

An ideal size is dependent on many factors. However, with your amount of RAM, I would go for the 2-1/2x's the amount of your RAM rule. The less room the swap file has to work with, the more heavily the RAM is used. If you have a decent amount of RAM though, you can safely reduce the swap file size with little or no effect on performance. Again, the HDD is running out of room, and there are other factors involved that cannot be improved by this. You may want to think about a second internal/external HDD soon.