Long loading times and slow/laggy gameplay even after trying numerous fixes

Hardcoremixer wrote:Hello everyone,

I'm Hardcoremixer and I have a problem with the Sims 3. I've always had a few speed issues with it, because I tried to install too much on my laptop than I should, but never ever were my problems as bad with worlds other than Isla Paradiso than they are now. A few months ago, I decided to uninstall the game completely and only install the base game and 2 expansions, to save some space for other programs (I had about 100GB on my system partition left). The initial loading screen took about 10 - 15 minutes and to load a city took about 45 minutes and there was really, really heavy lagging in-game. 
Of course I tried all things you can read up on online: deleting cache, reducing settings, cleaning the PC out and defragment, make backups and uninstall/reinstall stuff, etc. It reduced the loading time for about 5 to 10 minutes, but that was it. I unsintalled the game completely and simply went on with my life.

2 weeks ago I decided to go back to my previous build (sort of), installing virtually everything I had. I applied all the fixes, deleted what could be deleted, etc. And now the total loading time for both screens, to load up Twinbrook, is always 30 minutes. 5 For the first loading screen and 25 for the second. And although the lag is not AS bad, it's still pretty bad. Almost no animation goes smoothly. Maybe 1 out of 10 do. That bad. CAS loading times are horrible (that may just be the amount of content) and somestimes it takes more than a mniute for textures in my house to load. Everything simply remains white for that long. Sims pop up into the screen after long times, too. The game is pretty much unplayable that way. I was wondering if there's anything else I can do. I heard that merging packages doesnt necessarily work, so I havent tried that solution yet.
My laptop is only 1.5 years old and it hasnt got bad specs imo. It's and MSI, running windows 8.0 (i didnt upgrade), A10-4600M CPU (I believe thats got 4 cores), AMD Radeon HD 7970M 2 GB GDDR5 video card, plus a second video card I dont know the specifics from, only that it doesnt come with its own memory, like the 7970. 2x 4GB RAM and a 750GB 7200rpm HDD. No SSD, sadly. 
Could it be that the computer is already getting too old? It runs modded Skyrim while filming with bandicam in HD pretty well, using the heavy sharpshooters ENB on high quality settings, but it has problems with sims 3?? And not just problems, but pretty bad ones, too. I don't understand how that can be possible.

I was thinking of heat... it seems to heat up more easily than it previously did, but that cant be the only thing wrong. Can it? So basically, I'm at a loss here, I have no idea what the problem is. Maybe you guys can help me out. I will try defragmenting and all that again, though Ido that pretty regularly, so that cant be the problem either. I'll also try removing all my mods, store content and stuff like that and see how it runs then. But I did that before and only installed the core game with 2 expansions back then (late night and university), so Im pretty sceptic. But we'll see. If you guys have any ideas, that'd be awesome

Thanks! 
- Hardcoremixer

Hello Hardcoremixer and welcome to the forum,


Just to be sure, look again at this post here, and delete the cache files I mentioned there:
https://games4theworld.forumotion.com/t17208-sims-3-has-stopped-working#118442


Beyond that, I experienced the same, before my old HDD died. Everything was laggy as hell, but that was because my hard-drive (and the computer) were a bit old. I eventually scrambled to back up as much as I could from my old data, and then ended up replacing the HDD. Now everything works fine again.


It may be the same for yours too, but let's see. Are you getting similar lag issues in other games/software ? If something was wrong hardware-wise, you would get the lag everywhere probably.