Trouble growing Farms

[Brightstar]

I have recently acquired a rather odd probem I can't solve..........Am hoping that people here can shed a few lights for me.  Thanks in advance!

I recently changed laptops as my old one was dying.  I carefully reinstalled Sim City Rush Hour exactly as it had been on my old machine - ran both concurrently to be sure.  Every file and plugin was in exactly the same place except I am not using datpacker on the new machine yet.

Since I did that I can no longer grow all the farms.  Sounds silly I know but I have tried on a number of different sized regions at different growth stages.  The only farms that grow are the following ones: 
CSX Farm Paddy shack, Amber Waves Wheat Farm, All stages of Grampa Al's aple Farms, Goobers peanut farm, Magical fruit farm - beans, Shannon's Flower fields, BLS GA Farm - Turkeys, CSX Farm Daeley's lot, Sally's Cornfields (stage 1) And two old Nexis farms I have had forever did grow at higher stages a couple of times.

I have checked that I have all the latest essential files in the right places.  I have redownloaded all the farms that were still accessible.  As soon as the new BLS GA farms were available I downloaded and installed them too.
I removed the blockers I use and tried that too - only thing that changed was that the maxis farms grew just fine.
I have probably moved a few things duing my various attempts to fix this by the way.

I can only think of a couple of things - maybe I did inadvertantly move something I have forgotten about that all the other farms need.  Or because most of these are stage one farms maybe something in the regional mod doesn't like my system - except tht once I get past farms things seem to be fine (I think........).
Alternatively maybe there is something on my laptop the farms don't like.
I have an ASUS notebook with 80gb HD and 1.5gb RAM running Vista Basic.  My old IBM thinkpad ran XP by the way.

I desperately hope someone can help as having a problem I can't fix is driving me nuts!!  It also seems to be peculiar to me as I can't find anything on any of the forums anywhere.....hmmmm

ps: today I removed ALL plugins except the farms and their dependencies, essentials etc - no change.  The only thing I can think of is to dump them all in my Program Files plugins and see if that changes stuff.

[BarbyW]

The only thing that the farms all need - apart from their dependencies - are all the field packs. This is because various farms may use fields from any of the packs. To grow higher than stage 1 farms you do need some industrial growth somewhere in the region. Try zoning a small patch of industry in a corner of a farming city and then zone more farms away from the industry.
CAM will actually help with this as it changes the chance of farms growing. As farms do not upgrade there is little point in having different stages as it stands. I struggled many times with the bulldozer to get higher stage farms grow. When we were discussing how to use the CAM with farms we decided to make some changes to frequency of stage growth and also make a differential for stage 4 and upwards. All these will be explained once the CAM is released in hopefully 10 to 14 days.

[Brightstar]

Thanks Barby - guess I will try zoning industrial and see what happens.  Just seems a bit odd that I didn't have this problem with my last pc - it seemed to grow stage three the minute I built a decent town "next door".
Anyhow - sounds like the CAM will help heaps!

I do have all the field packs by the way - I get plenty of variety there.