I have been playing Sims since before Sims Unleashed came out (it was the first game I preordered) so I'm a massive Sims fan. Sims 3 I have played since release and always give up for extended periods of time because the game messes up and becomes unplayable which just breaks my heart after the effort I put in so I lose interest.

Currently my game is lagging every few minutes to every few seconds for several seconds at a time when it was absolutely fine when I logged off last night. I am trying to install MasterController, ErrorTrap, and Overwatch to see if they can fix my game and make the game more fun. I am downloading them, extracting them, going to EA Games, Sims 3, making a folder called Mods, making a folder called Packages, and inserting the .package files within there. When reloading the game I am not getting any messages on the screen where you click to play your family and within the game I am finding nothing either.

I am using version 1.69 of the game. I watched YouTube videos to make sure I am doing it correctly and that's not helping me either so I must be doing something wrong.

Is anyone able to help me please?

I realised I was installing them in the Program Files rather than Documents it worked!

What didn’t work was it fixing the freezing.

Good job on working it out, and on starting the process of understanding what is going on!

Did any files with 'ScriptError' in the name appear in that same Documents location after running the game with ErrorTrap? If so, you can upload them somewhere and link here.

ErrorTrap and Overwatch will do most of the heavy lifting in terms of trying to get things in order. Considering that you didn't have mods in play, that at least narrows things down to either being performance related or some EA issues that we may be able to recommend fixes for.
It would be useful to know your computer specs, as well as what world you are playing in.