Thought I’d do a quick post to help those out who bought the SIMS 3 for Christmas and are having trouble running it.
This comes from helping a friend who bought this for his children and then found that it wouldn’t work!
The symptoms here were that when launching the game – the following error would appear:
Service Initialization Failed – 0x065d0274
Looking around on google, this appears to be a fairly common problem. In this particular situation – an update to the latest graphics drivers (for an ATI x1300 Pro) fixed the problem. However it also appears there’s a trend of similar errors for Vista users.
If you’re seeing this error and are using Vista – try right clicking on the SIMS icon, and then select “Run As Administrator”.
Happy Holidays!