This isn't a major problem, but it is somewhat curious and I'm hoping to get some feedback.

I have an HP Pavilion dv1000 laptop, which I've been playing Sims 2 on for a good five months or so by now. Tonight, while I was making a graveyard for one of my neighborhoods, my game froze. When I hit ctrl-tab to go back to the desktop, my desktop was the 620x480 and 16 colors typical of video card errors. It was indeed a video error - I got a Windows message telling me that my display driver (ialmrnts.dll) failed to respond, and another error from the game saying that it had to shut down because of my video driver.

Now, when I restarted my computer, the video was back to normal once I got to my desktop. I upgraded my display driver to the latest version and went back into the game to see if I could recreate the error - sure enough, after starting to recreate the graveyard (and saving a whole lot along the way) it happened again. It seems to take about ten to fifteen minutes before the crash happens (I noticed a marked slowdown in performance after I visited the lot and quit the game normally as well).

Now, this lot I was making contains a decent amount of custom content. It's 3x4 and had a mixture of custom statues, custom graves, an above-ground structure, a hill, a fence all around the lot, and a lake. The two most elaborate custom items on this lot were an altar I got from a russian site and the Grand Trianon Fountain Temple.

Being a laptop, my video driver is the Intel 915GM/GMS,910GML chipset. The processor is an Intel Celeron M 1.5 GHz, and I have 502 megs of RAM. I'm also running XP Home Edition. I can recreate the error if a detailed description of the error message is needed, and I can also provide a screenshot of the lot in question.


What's the verdict? Do I just need to stop using all these custom items? Could it be my laptop overheating? Or will I have to send the hunk of metal back to the manufacturer for repair? Any and all feedback on this will be welcome.

Now the same error's happened while I was playing a family. I'm starting to get worried.