Sims 3 Intermittent freezing / resuming game play

Hi (I'm a noob to your site)

I have all Sims 3 expansions and stuff packs up to Showtime. No custom content or mods.

I've noticed that my sims would freeze intermittently (while fountains, trees, music continued) for about 10 seconds then resume. This is also happening in build mode. Yesterday I uninstalled everything and did a complete reinstall. (I haven't installed anything from your site at this point)

The home I'm building is quite large; however, I've built the same size if not larger in the past without issue.

I really hope there is a fix out there. Thank you for the site, and for your help

//EDIT

Update, the build mode freezing is extreme reaching 10+ min. So the game isn't really playable.

To fix this issue, what i did was to go in the Options menu, and drag the Draw Distance slider to LOW, this way the lagg of the town coming from other sims won't affect you while you are playing, once you set that on LOW, you wont be able to see the town in a horizontal way but still you feel almost no difference and it improves the performance waaaaay more! Good luck!

I've changed my settings to the lowest possible on every option. Still lag city.

I'm playing Sunset Valley and don't have any mods or cc.

I will try that for sure and get back with you. Do you think this would also impact the build mode lag?