pc EA/Origin transition has locked me out of Sims 4

[Beebo Brink]

Now that I'm retired, I finally have time to play Sims 4, right! Wrong.

I tried to open the game today and was prompted to replace Origin with the EA portal instead. Once I'd done that, however, EA insists I need 20GB of hard disk space to update my Sims 4 game before I can play it again. I only have 8 GB left, so not even close.

What's going on and do I have any options other than A) abandoning Sims 4 or B) getting a new hard drive just so I can play the occasional game?

ETA: I poked around and I still have the Origin/Sims 4 files, at 32GB, so should I delete those?

ETA2: I found a place in the settings to point to the Origin files, but I'm still getting a notice that EA needs 20GB of hard disk space for the update. wtf?

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Not sure of the existing size of your current HDD but running a system cleanup or at least dumping the contents of "temp" folders can open up quite a bit. I like to use WinDirStat to track down the bulkiest data. Since it sums up everything, sorting by size will expose oddly bulky folders.

Adding a dedicated "game" drive can also be a good move. I personally have an S: drive where Steam and all associated games are installed. I strongly recommend it.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Imnotgoing Sideways - 8Gb is the space I have left after optimization, but I do have another regular HDD drive with 200GB free. I was under the impression that putting files on another drive would slow down gameplay, but I'm willing to give it a try. Would it be worth buying an SSD drive for that purpose?

I'll start researching how to move my game program files to another disk. Thanks!

 

[Khamon]

Mine is an SSD and games are natively installed to it and it works like a charm.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I dumped all my game stuff on my spinning Big drive and only system files on my SSD, at least in the past, I’m not sure if it’s as much of a factor as before, the more file writes you do on an SSD the faster they wear out, and they wear out more than an old reliable spinning platter.

you can absolutely put all your games on an HDD. But if you find it grindingly slow, a second SSD just for games can be had more affordably these days than five years ago.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I dumped all my game stuff on my spinning Big drive and only system files on my SSD, at least in the past, I’m not sure if it’s as much of a factor as before, the more file writes you do on an SSD the faster they wear out, and they wear out more than an old reliable spinning platter.

you can absolutely put all your games on an HDD. But if you find it grindingly slow, a second SSD just for games can be had more affordably these days than five years ago.

I'm a pretty low impact player, so I'm not too worried about wearing out an SSD, but I'll start with the HDD because it's what I have now, and I can practice moving the games over.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

I dumped all my game stuff on my spinning Big drive and only system files on my SSD, at least in the past, I’m not sure if it’s as much of a factor as before, the more file writes you do on an SSD the faster they wear out, and they wear out more than an old reliable spinning platter.

you can absolutely put all your games on an HDD. But if you find it grindingly slow, a second SSD just for games can be had more affordably these days than five years ago.

That is what I do because my SSD isn't all that large and my spinning ones are quite large. There are sometimes a few games that do not like that, but it's pretty rare. I didn't see any noticeable issue with RDR2 (obviously on HDD because that thing is really large), but did with The Witcher 2. It had all sorts of lag and slowdowns. I moved it to the SSD and it runs fine, now.

I have had The Sims 4, with a lot/most of the DLC's installed on a spinning drive with no issue, FWIW. The game saves/settings are still found in the SSD in the Documents folder, but are much smaller than the similar Sims 3 save files, which could get quite large.

I was not very happy when forced to switch to that EA app, as well. It happened automatically for me as I had Microsoft Gamepass Ultimate which included EA. It uninstalled Origin automatically and installed EA. Talk about a buggy program. I think it's definitely a WIP, where the Origin app had been running just fine, thank you very much. That EA app is being forced on EA games on Steam, as well. I installed Mass Effect Legendary on Steam and was force fed that app, which could not count achievements. Not a big deal to me, but yeah, buggy.

 

[Noodles]

Someone could comfirm, but I imagine EA backups your saves if you care about those, and you ahould be able to redownload everything. I am thinking that removing all the old files could free up the needed space. If anything because it may be able to straight download the up to date version and not need the complete additional 20GB.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Well, I tried. The instructions for moving The Sims 4 app files to another disk are pretty simple, but the Registry Editor file I'm supposed to edit doesn't match what's on my computer.

The good news, however, is that I used the Repair option on The Sims 4 app (which took about 3 hours), and at the end of the process I stopped getting the "disk too full" error message. I can now play the game on my SSD, right where it's always been.

At some point, I may just get the local computer shop to migrate me on to a larger SSD. Back when I first built this computer 117GB seemed like more space than I could use in a lifetime. LOL.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Well, I tried. The instructions for moving The Sims 4 app files to another disk are pretty simple, but the Registry Editor file I'm supposed to edit doesn't match what's on my computer.

The good news, however, is that I used the Repair option on The Sims 4 app (which took about 3 hours), and at the end of the process I stopped getting the "disk too full" error message. I can now play the game on my SSD, right where it's always been.

At some point, I may just get the local computer shop to migrate me on to a larger SSD. Back when I first built this computer 117GB seemed like more space than I could use in a lifetime. LOL.

Sounds like when it migrated to EA, it lost track of your installed game and a repair fixed it. Not too surprised at EA's competence.

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Separating OS and app drives can improve performance a bit.

For physical HDD, the seek times become parallel operations instead of hammering back and forth between game, OS, and swap operations.

For SSD, the more free capacity, the better. As stated earlier, full SSDs wear faster. NAND flash writes are physically destructive. So having a large portion of free space is beneficial. Mostly because the data is usually spread out evenly to reduce wear. But, when space gets low, new writes get clustered into what few remaining segments are available.

I like to draw the line at 60% and add storage once that threshold is met. So far, my now 7 year old SSD has been a solid daily trooper. With a separate game SSD and a majority of "My Documents" files are on a FreeNAS box to keep local drive clutter down. Gigabit Ethernet appears to outrun spinny disks anyway.

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

Sadly with Microshit, your system drive should be at least 256gb, 512 is safer. Then I put in a 8tb secondary drive just for large apps/games/what not. Then I put in a Synology NAS with 80TB for my music/anime/backups

I may have a digital hording problem.

 

[Fionalein]

omg just bought lots of new stuff, already dreading the update

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Quick answers:

• Putting game files on another HDD never hurts. In fact, putting it on a HDD where not the swap file and OS is located at might improve performance!
• 8 GB of free space only? Get a new HDD/SSD now, prices are really low at the moment!
• Modern SSDs will last for a few decades. So don’t worry about them breaking sooner than a HDD, it’s actually now the other way around!
• If playing modern open world games and such, where tons of stuff need to be read regularly, put it on an SSD! Same goes for the Second Life viewer cache.

 

[Noodles]

Sadly with Microshit, your system drive should be at least 256gb, 512 is safer. Then I put in a 8tb secondary drive just for large apps/games/what not. Then I put in a Synology NAS with 80TB for my music/anime/backups

I may have a digital hording problem.

80TB. Damn I though I had too much space for random downloads. I think I have maybe, 20, across a Synology and a couple.of PCs.

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

...put it on an SSD! Same goes for the Second Life viewer cache.

Or, go for broke: 64GB of RAM with 8GB dedicated to a Ramdisk. It bogs boot and shutdown a bit but it's nice to have a cache which outruns my cable modem 10,000x over.
Plus, 2 bricks of 4 Dominators, flanking the CPU looks frigg'n cool! =^-^=

 

[Beebo Brink]

Final Resolution

Thank you, everyone! Based on all your very good advice, I've optimized my system as follows:

First off, I bit the bullet and just uninstalled The Sims 4 entirely, then downloaded it to my extra hard drive, which has plenty of room. (Took about 10-12 hours, so I just left it running and went to bed.) When I played a test game this morning, performance was good. Unless that changes drastically, I'll just keep my games on the HDD from now on.

Lastly, the file migration cleared out about 30GB from my boot drive, so it's just under 60% utilization. Which means I don't need to upgrade the boot disk anytime soon (if ever).