I used to play Sims 3 on a super crappy Dell. Anytime my sims would use a laptop, the game would have these huge rainbow things sticking out of their house.
But I worked around it. Eventually, I upgraded to a laptop that was just as crappy as that Dell I had and I would get crashes.
Finally, I invested over 1k into a gaming laptop to be able to play the Sims 3 and other games I had been missing out on.
I did have some issues with my Nvidia card and 3.. It was running at 500 FPS!! BUT, I figured it out. I spent a couple of hours getting the game to run properly on my laptop and now I rarely ever have a problem.. And most of it is related to bad cc.
I bought Sims 4 when it came out and a few of the packs. I really did try to like it.. But it's just not the game for me. And players of 4 are always talking crap about 3.. Even though just as many players have problems running 4 as 3 did. Every other post on reddit is someone having problems with their game, yet 3 is a "boring laggy mess" according to them.
Then when I tell them that I don't have issues with 3, I get called a liar. Yes, I actually get called a liar, lmao.
And it's like.. I'm sorry you can't use Google to find some basic fixes to run 3.. But that doesn't make 4 better. It just means you're lazy.