The Sims 2

I just purchased a brand new Dell laptop with Vista, and whenever I try to create a new family, it will freeze.
It will also freeze/stop loading when
-I try and load some households
-I go downtown
And sometimes, I will completely load a household, but the screen (minus the control panel) will be black, and the music will be playing, but nothing will show up.
I have already uninstalled and reinstalled many times, and this still happens.
I played these games on my old computer and this never happened.
Help!!!

The Sims 2 was not originally created to run on Vista and is more of an XP game. Some people do have issues with it freezing up on Vista, though I have yet to have that issue since I bought the deluxe version with all the patches already applied to the game.

You may want to visit the Sims website and see if any patches are available for download and apply them if they are. Barring that, right clicking on short cut for the Sims and selecting the compatibility tab and selecting XP SP2 may help resolve the issues.

We also need your system specifications. Simply telling us you have the trashcan 2000 (Dell) doesn't really indicate the type of system you have. If you do not have enough RAM to play the game AND Vista, then the errors you described above can and will happen. Additionally, an incompatible graphics card can also cause these issues.