Marie you are good to go on both accounts. You have fast processors as processors 2.6 and higher are good and even better if the processors are all faster than 3.0 and yours is. 4 gigs of ram is good - more is always better, but the 4 will be a very good safe number. Believe it or not there are simmers trying to play this game on 2-3 gigs of ram. I'd be bald pulling my hair out with that. You can get a bit more of omph out of your game if you go into options and move shadows and lighting down to medium too as you really don't need it on high as there is little difference between high and medium visually, but it saves the pc enormously with nothing lost. Of course you do not have to do that, it just may be something you might want to consider. After resetting that particular setting you will need to quit the game and reboot the pc for that one setting to take affect - I believe it lets you know that also. But for now you sound good to go.
You are also good to go with the that empty version of SV - is that Magic Dancers as i know that one is good - just get the one with the lots already added as the ingame editor has it's own problems, so it is better if you make sure the world has lots and try not to add many using that world editor. You can generally get away with adding 3-4 before it starts breaking routing or appears to be breaking routing - but anyway that is based off of the CAW Sunset Valley lite that EA added to CAW for people to build their own worlds and it has never had sims in it to worry about. Hope that helps.
