In addition to everything igazor has said (and I agree with him on all of it), you might try playing with SP but without some of its add-ons. For example, SP Careers is especially demanding, and leaving it out might fix most of the issues you've seen. Or you could slow down the Careers manager within SP. There's no harm in experimenting.

Is Sims 3 installed on the SSD or the HDD? The game will load and save much faster if it and your user folder are on an SSD. And if it is on the SSD, how much use has your QVO seen over the years? It doesn't have the same lifespan as other SATA SSDs: although it's certainly more than fine as a gaming drive, if you've been doing extensive professional-level work, you could have surpassed the ~300 TB write life. There are plenty of free tools, for example CrystalDiskMark, to test if you think the drive might be slowing down.

puzzlezaddict - Good catch on the SSD questions, I meant to ask about that but it got lost somewhere along the way I guess...

puzzlezaddict post_id=82726 time= wrote: In addition to everything igazor has said (and I agree with him on all of it), you might try playing with SP but without some of its add-ons. For example, SP Careers is especially demanding, and leaving it out might fix most of the issues you've seen. Or you could slow down the Careers manager within SP. There's no harm in experimenting.

Yes. Yes there is my friend. It's frustrating if you don't know how to use it. Too many rules to control...it just slows down your game altogether no matter how good your computer is...to the point where you can't anymore with it. So you go back to the simpler storyline times...with Sims 3. That's exactly where I draw the line from "cheating".... ಠ_ಠ

@AYHJA And I too agree with a balance of a RAM upgrade AND an SSD upgrade! If I had to choose, I'd get the Crucial SSD! It's a budget saver! Well, the Crucial MX500, to be exact.

My SSD will be a year old on July 1st! I'll probably upgrade it soon after, if not before. Prime Day is soon! My install is on a separate drive from my mods and such folder, which is on the SSD. My Samsung 860 QVO is on Amazon right now for $129, I'll likely buy another one soon anyway and use the one I have in now for work, can never have enough hard drives. It's a great excuse to get a fresh copy of my OS installed and all that.

As far as SP goes, I'm going to get my family to a point where I can progress comfortably, and then work on adding SP back in. My immortal sim has a kid now, and she's super vanilla. I have to learn how to do all those things over again. The story is that the kid is Sims 3 is the sim I'm playing in Sims 4, but I digress.

First things first, is it okay if I ask my questions in this thread, or should I start new topics..? It's been so long since I've been active on a forum, FB killed my forum a long time ago, lol. I'd not like to start new threads, but if that's what is done here, I have no issues following the rules.

I stopped simming in 2014. That's how old my save was before I started to revive my game. It's basically like starting over. When my game CTD's, can those dumps be investigated..? There's just so much I don't know or have forgotten. If I knew of a way I could bundle my neighborhood and everything in it and start a new game with only those items I'd do it in a heartbeat. I KNOW I have a ton of stuff in my game or dupe stuff and broken things in my dresser that I need to get out. Most of, if not all my CTD's happen in the CAS changing outfits.

AYHJA post_id=82734 time=1622859224 user_id=23008 wrote:First things first, is it okay if I ask my questions in this thread, or should I start new topics..?

AYHJA - Well, that is if it's on-topic. We wanna avoid necro-posting topics, so do start a new thread, if you will...please. This one is all over the place. So, so sorry, dude.

Take a look at what NRaas Porter does:

Porter

Along with saving your favorite houses and community lots to the bin, you can basically bundle up all the important parts of your current save and plop them down in a new one, either in the same world or elsewhere. (If you use the same world, it's a good idea to Totally Annihilate the existing population first, minus one placeholder sim.)

It's also a good idea to start with a clean Sims 3 user folder, that is if you're starting a new save anyway, and sometimes even if you're not. Reinstalling store stuff and custom content can be a chore, but you get to clean out everything extraneous all at once. And you can also save a copy of your user folder, store content and cc installed but with nothing else, so that if and when you want another clean folder for whatever reason, you have a spare copy ready to go.

I'm not an orgnaizer here, so my opinion on how threads should be organized doesn't carry any weight, but I think it's usually best to start a new thread for any distinct issue, as in, not one that's a continuation of this conversation but contains a separate and standalone question. But I doubt anyone will get annoyed with wherever you decide to draw the line.

Necroposting is obviously not a concern in a thread that's only a few days old. Opinions differ on the minimum interval between posts that would qualify a new post as a necro, but it's at least on the scale of multiple months.

Okay, thanks guys. I'll just start a new topic for my other question and keep this one on topic. I'll edit my first post to reflect what I've learned and maybe start new topics for troubleshooting SP when I add it back. Thanks again for the help, I really appreciate it.