Sims 3 never uses more than 1.7gb RAM? (crash)

@rinlinlin  Please test your game in Sunset Valley or Twinbrook, two of the best EA-made worlds, to set a baseline for performance.  Some custom worlds are great, some are not, and some work well under certain circumstances but not others, so it's easier to deal with a known quantity.

The first thing to do is check your in-game framerates.  Open the cheats console (crtl-shift-C) and enter "fps on" without quotes.  A number will appear in the upper right corner, and it should never go above the refresh rate of your monitor (probably 144 Hz, maybe 120 or even 60) or whatever number you've used to manually cap fps.  Excessively high framerates can cause crashing and other issues as well.

If your game crashes even though fps is locked in, please remove your custom content and test again.  I'm not saying you need to play without cc, just that it's worth testing before moving on to other potential problems.  Even one bad cc item can cause repeated crashes despite the game otherwise running smoothly.

Please also post the first 40 lines or so of deviceconfig.log, which is in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3.  (Stop when you get to the Options section.)  You can remove your user and machine names, about 25 lines down, but please include everything else.  This will show how the game sees and rates your hardware.  Since the guide you linked recommends a few edits to the game's .sgr files, I'd like to see the results.

By the way, what kind of install is this?  I'm not going to tell you to patch to 1.69, but troubleshooting is different with a disc install than it is for a Steam install.

And yes, to answer your question, Sims 3 can and does use more than 2 GB memory.  It often doesn't need that much though, especially in a new save in a smaller world, or if you don't have all the expansions installed.

Oh geez, I forgot to add an fps limiter earlier. Explains why I crashed. I've been playtesting in Twinbrook with no mods for an hour and so far it's been playing very smoothly. I did install the game by disk because I wanted to downgrade to 1.67.

I also attached my device config!

Thank you for your help!