Well in linux you have several tools that can help you figure out why they are crashing.
Usually if you run a program by calling it from a command line you can keep track of any errors messages it produces by a simple redirection.
program.name 2> error.log
You can also use some commands to figure out it's dependances. Maybe one of the library files is corrupted or something. Other programs using those libraries would be subjected to those same problems
ldd program.name
If you need to find the actual command file you have:
which program.name
If you still have the original package it came in, maybe a rpm or a .deb file you can extract it and then compare the 2 files copies together to make sure that the one that you are using is still fine.
md5sum program.name
md5sum copy.of.program.name
Of course the one that is most usefull but outputs the most stuff, is:
strace program.name
With tools like those you can maybe figure out 20%-30% of the problems yourself. There probably a few other dozen tools like lsof and stuff like that, but that's about what I'd use.
I don't know what windows counterparts exist for that stuff.
But in either Linux or Windows your usually your not the only person to encounter this problem. In linux most big programs have a home-page and probably a mailing list. You can use that to find other people's fixes, common problems will have answers in FAQs. A search using google and it's tools it provides is very usefull and wll get fixes for the other 70-80% of the problems. Above and beyond that you may have to examine the source code yourself if you have those types of skills and/or learn howto make a detailed and usefull bug report and submit that to the author.
In windows you can find answers in online FAQs and forums. You can also shoot off e-mails to the developers and see if they have a answer. There are also ways to run good bugreports.
With the internet your troubleshooting skills should go up 1001%. You just start from the obvious, easy stuff and work your way up. For instance I would first go look at the manufacturer's
s website for patches and answers, go ask in some Sims-based website for help, then find out the location of the save files for the sims, make a backup and uninstall/reinstall it. That would probably fix it.
