Re: Game suddenly unplayable due to lag even after reinstalling

Wow you are always my hero! I unplugged my ethernet cable so I was completely without internet and it made no difference. I use the EA app (because it forces you to now >☹️ ) I used to use origin but it made me switch. The game has been running fine from the EA app thus far.

I have attached my dxdiag. 

OneDrive is not running and has 767GB in it apparently.

It's interesting you mention OneDrive because I turned off backing up to OneDrive because I was getting lots of alerts that OneDrive was full and it annoyed me. I looked and I could see a lot of it was all of my Sims CC so I turned my backup off and deleted it all. The game has been working fine for months after this, though.

@x-Sakaeru-x  Your dxdiag lists some generic Windows errors, so it's a good idea to run a couple of basic checks on your Windows system files:

• Hit Windows key-X
• Choose either “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Windows Terminal (Administrator),” whichever option is offered
• Inside the window that appears, copy and paste “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” without quotes, and enter
• The system will start validating soon. If it throws an error, please list it here
• After it reaches 100%, hit Windows key-X again
• Again, choose “PowerShell (Administrator)” or “Windows Terminal (Administrator)”
• Inside the window, copy and paste “sfc /scannow” without quotes, and enter
• Post the message you receive here

Restart your computer, hit Windows key-i, select Update & Security, and click the box to check for updates.  If any install, restart again afterwards.

Please test Sims 3 in a clean user folder, if you haven't already.  Move the entire Sims 3 folder out of Documents > Electronic Arts and onto your desktop, and when you launch the game, a clean folder will spawn with no content.  (Your saves and other content will be intact in the fodler you've moved but temporarily not read by the game.)  Don't add anything to the new folder yet; just start a new save in Sunset Valley and see how it runs.

If the new save runs fine, try copying over one of your existing saves, but nothing else yet.  Since you're copying and pasting rather than dragging and dropping, you don't need to worry about the effects of missing mods and custom content.

If the new save is laggy too, please try playing in a clean boot:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd

The one service you need to leave enabled is the EABackgroundService, which the EA App needs in order to run.  Disable everything else, as described, and when you restart your computer, go through the Task Manager's background processes list shutting down everything that doesn't absolutely need to be running.  If you accidentally kill the wrong service and it doesn't restart on its own, just reboot your computer again.

First run in powershell showed no error.

Second said:

"Verification 100% complete.

Windows resource protection did not find any integrity violations"

No updates available.

Tested in a clean folder -- I have tried this a few times and I've even completely uninstalled and reinstalled twice with no mods or cc or expansions.

I did a clean boot and it is still laggy.

The one thing I can maybe think of is that my version of windows isn't verified but again this has not caused any problems in the months I have been playing the Sims just fine.

@x-Sakaeru-x  I'd like to see the results of some hardware monitoring.  Please download hwinfo (it's free) from here:

https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

You don't need to install anything; just choose the Portable version, unzip it, and launch it from Downloads or wherever you like.  If you do want the full installer, be sure to click the button for hwinfo itself, not for lansweeper.

Restart your computer, open hwinfo, choose Sensors Only, and click the button that's a sheet of paper with a + to start logging.  Save the log file to your desktop for easy access.  Wait five minutes, then open Sims 3 and play for at least 20 minutes.  Don't alt-tab out of the game or run any other programs, aside from the EA App of course, while you're testing.  When you're done, click the same button to stop the logging.

Please upload the log to the third-party filesharing site of your choice (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and link it for me.  Either leave it in .csv format or, if you're going to use OneDrive, create a .zip file, and don't open the log before uploading it, or else my log reader might not be able to interpret it.

Okay here it is. Game was so painful to play lol.

Hope this link works. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FP4ORXwNwheGe_8uyAIL2ym8WzT6KpjD/view?usp=sharing

I assume the problem has something to do with memory, especially because I was getting the error code 12 whilst saving a lot before the game became unplayable like this. It's just weird because I'm able to run games like Planet Zoo with 5000+ NPCs and 100s of animals being simulated at once on max graphics and it runs beautifully. Maybe it's because I messed around with virtual memory a bit in the past when trying to fix the error 12 problem but again I don't know why it suddenly stopped working after being fine and I don't understand why every other game works perfectly but the sims is stuttering more than it did on my * laptop when I was a kid and this is without any cc, mods, or expansion packs. 

Thanks for your continued help c:

@x-Sakaeru-x  The link probably does work, but it's asking me to sign in, which means access is restricted.  Please either set the permissions to "anyone with the link" or, if you prefer, you can PM me the link instead.

What exactly did you do with virtual memory?  Your dxdiag shows plenty of storage set aside for the page file, in truth a lot more than your computer could probably ever use, but if you merely increased this size, that wouldn't affect how Sims 3 runs.  The game doesn't respond well to having its data paged, and that wouldn't do anything to overcome the 32-bit limit anyway.

Are you running an existing save or a new one, and did you ever play it with more than the base game active?  Since you mentioned not using any expansions, I want to make sure that that's not the issue: removing an expansion from a save that's already been exposed to it can cause anything from terrible performance to an error when trying to load the save in the first place.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FP4ORXwNwheGe_8uyAIL2ym8WzT6KpjD/view?usp=sharing 

I think this should work.

And yes for virtual memory I just increased the amount my PC can use so it shouldn't cause any issue but wanted to mention it anyway.

I have been running a new save each time I've done tests and haven't activated any expansions since the last time I reinstalled. When the problem started I hadn't changed anything to do with cc, mods or expansions so I don't think it's anything to do with that. I was running it with all expansions and a lot of CC and mods but it was working fine for months. 

Also just to add: I have spent hours trying a million different ways of launching the game. The problem still persists with any variation of expansions activated and with graphics on lowest settings and crap screen resolution. Every other game of mine still working perfectly -- I have no idea what to try  next I feel like I've tried everything. I just don't understand how the game has been working perfectly and then suddenly stopped ☹️