Why is my Sims 3 game laggy?

@rhiho The lag is caused by Windows inability to create temp files on the system drive. 9Gb free is WAY to little free space. My first guess is the system drive at 114Gb is too small for the Windows operating system.

I performed a disk cleanup and now I have 17gb free. Do you think that's enough or should I be looking for a new SSD?

@rhiho  The way the Windows operating system works it starts bloated and does not get better with time it only gets worse. Just to download a 1.2Gb game installer (not unusual today) you need 2.4Gb of storage space. First the file download to a temp file and when the download is complete the file is copied to the destination folder. Both these files may exist at the same time and the temp file may or may not get deleted. And we haven't talked about extracting and moving files around when you install the game. We haven't begin to talk about what Windows does in the background. When I start editing a 1Gb movie it is not unusual to have 3 files created while working with the movie. The minimum storage device I would recommend for the Windows operating system is 240Gb and you will have to keep a close eye on it. I wouldn't get less then 500Gb device. IMO 17Gb is not enough.

You could go old school and instead of purchasing a brand new hard drive, go for either additional ram or an external 32/64gb ramdisk. 

With additional software.  temp load the entire game [32gb] [and other games that you play] onto ramdisk and the speed/loadtimes/fps[to lesser extent] will be awesim.

Playing the sims using ramdisk should fix the problem, if not then its most defiantly the game, but in other ways it will benefit when playing other games. 

Using ramcache it does make a difference, especially older computers.

Here a link with further info- https://rog.asus.com/technology/republic-of-gamers-motherboard-innovations/ramdisk/

@rhiho  The problem with off loading games to a data drive from a ssd is you lose the benefit of the ssd. To run a gaming computer from a small ssd requires frequent maintenance that most casual user don't do or don't realize this is required. This is a discussion we frequently have in the shop. These are techs that have great knowledge of the Windows operating system. Until the price of ssds comes down where they are in competition with conventional hard drives, ssds are a nice expensive toy to be used by knowledgeable users, not the casual gamer. If your looking to get more performance from your storage devices you should look the a raid array using conventional drives. This will allow you to get a performance boost at an affordable cost.

hth

Have you tried restarting Sims 3 completely? I have a post on how to restart COMPLETELY but idk if it'll help? You can give it a try if you want.

Happy simming and good luck! 😉