Hi everyone,
I've been playing Sims 3 for a while now and I've noticed that when I'm in buy mode my pc not always but often will show a flickering black screen and crash the game to the point of full pc restart. I could be using buy mode for 30 minutes perfectly fine and suddenly BAM black screen flicker/crash.
The times that I am able to see my desktop afterwards (If I alt+tab fast enough) it says the display media accelerator has stopped responding and recovered. Thing is, I've checked and my driver from Toshiba (Intel site says mine's custom from Toshiba) is up to date. I have a Toshiba Win 7 laptop with "4GB ram, Processor Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU P6200 @ 2.13GHz, 2133 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s), Intel HD Graphics". My sims and everything move perfectly fine with no lag or glitching, just the darned buy mode!

If anyone has any ideas, let me know. It's driving me crazy as I never know when it will do it.

I found this website:

Sims 3 errors

Scroll down to problem #2, which offers possible solutions. What antivirus are you running?

I wonder if my laptop overheats somehow. Like I said before, sometimes I can play a long period before it happens other times it's instant. I hit the "disable" feature on my Avira, though I'm not sure if that's actually stopping it.

Hopefully someone else will have other ideas. You should check to make sure that you aren't running any other programs in the background, of course. This problem sounds very annoying!

Dreamer

This might not help with your specific problem but there are forums and literally hundreds of tutorials to teach you everything you wanted to know about sims 2 and 3. Everything from building cellars, attached garages, half walls, designing clothes. You name it they seem to have it and no cost involved.

Mod the Sims

UPDATE:

After much frustration, I finally did a recovery to factory settings, which basically resets all the hardware and the computer to its original out-of-box settings. I play the Sims 3 for about 3 1/2 hours mostly in buy/build mode with the last 30 min in live mode. So far no issues or stuttering of any kind. I will keep my post updated in case anyone ever stumbles across the same issue. If all goes well, however, then I would say a system recovery to factory settings resets the corruption

Ps: just to give an idea, all settings were on medium except for the sim detail on very high and reflections on mirrors/water.