My Very Dear Friend Kathleen Lynch Has Passed Away

Sadly, on Monday, 23rd of March, just before midday local Sydney time Kathleen passed away, unable to fully recover from her brain surgery and the following treatment.

I was about to board a plane to visit Kath in hospital when I got the news that I was too late. I was on my way to say hello and possibly goodbye, but sadly I never got to do either. Now the next step is the memorial service on Monday.

Sorry for the late notice to simmers who knew Kath (saraswati), but I’ve been busy trying to help the family get through this horrible time and help get things ready for Monday’s memorial.

Kath had formed many strong bonds of friendship with the Sims community and she will be sadly missed by MANY, family and friends alike.

The one thing I will always be greatful for, is that without Kath, my husband (Martin) and I would never have met. Thank you Kath. *hugs*

R.I.P my dear friend. ❤️

Kath a week before she passed away.

Kath a week before she passed away. It’s hard to imagine she is no longer with us.

Starter Homes

Yes, you read right, I’ve been making some starter homes (under the name of *Starter Road*) recently and I will be slowly adding some starting from this week.

Some are done with the Pre-SecuROM EP’s and some are done with all of the packs (EP’s & SP’s), so I’m catering for all simmers.

Anyway, all ‘Starter Road‘ homes are under 20,000 simoleons, but include all of the basic needs for your Sims to start out.

Remember, you don’t need a chess board or a telescope for logic to start with, all you need them to do is do the crossword puzzle each day in the newspaper. 😀

Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and SecuROM

As you may know, EA released a full collection of our beloved Sims 2 and decided to give it away free to anyone who had Sims 2 registered in their Origin account… then because of the high demand, they decided to give it to anyone who had an Origin account. What they didn’t tell anyone was that they had implemented SecuROM into the mix.

So, EA did what they always do and didn’t inform us of them doing this, and here I was worried about having to have ORIGIN on my PC… I didn’t even think to check for SecuROM.

When Maryh mentioned to me that some simmers were asking if there was SecuROM in the new Sims2 Collection I decided to take a look under the hood. That’s when I found EA had put/left SecuROM in their nice Free Sims2 Ultimate Collection. *Why am I not surprised* I should have known they couldn’t be trusted.

Now I remember WHY I dislike EA so much. They lie to everyone, they sneak DRMs into everything without warning even though they ARE MEANT TO TELL US.

Copies of the court documents:
complain-against-ea-for-non-disclosure-of-securomea-securom-disclosures

AND, I have the PROOF.

Checking with ProtectionID:
The Game exe
SecuROM in the exeA known SecuROM file- paul.dll
A known SecuROM file - paul.dll

For more proof… look through this zipped file.

What you do with this info is up to you… but what I will be doing is removing Origin, the Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and SecuROM from my PC.    >:(

Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and SecuROM on RYG

UPDATE
Trying to remove Sims2 UC, Origin and SecuROM… all is successful except a SecuROM License key in the registry won’t delete at all. I will have to work on this further and hopefully I can find a way for it to be deleted.

UPDATE – 2
Thanks to Nalia over at SimsCave reminding me about trying TrashReg, I was able to delete the SecuROM License key from the registry. Although it didn’t work years ago, this newer version does do the trick. So, I’ve updated the SecuROM Removal Instructions at the bottom to incorporate using TrashReg to delete those stubborn registry keys. 🙂