Hi there, this topic hasn't been updated since June, so I was wondering what your current status is. I recently downloaded Sims 3 & Sims 4 back onto my laptop a few weeks ago (after having general non-Sims performance issues over the summer so I reinstalled Windows onto a clean drive). The Sims 4 worked perfectly fine from the get-go, but The Sims 3 was always crashing like 5 - 10 minutes into it, and just like your issue, with no visual error message evident. I was wondering if you're still having the crashing issue as I did something so simple that fixed it for me, was actually quite shocking to say the least. :-)
