Your future Type 2 diabetes will even all of this out for you.

Kids and their enormous bladders. 5-6 times per day is probably average. If you drink a lot of water, even more. I know someone who went 12 times a day and wasn't diabetic, but just really liked beer.

Also, I challenge your road trip math. My four times a day would only result in you having to pull the car over once every six hours. You can drive from LA to San Francisco in that time without visiting a single rest area.

The game died on me pretty fast now, it was good at first, I finally got my kingdom where I wanted it. And hey I unlocked the next part! What's this? I have to start ALL OVER AGAIN?! On the same map? With the same damn quests? And the same damn buildings? Yeah...it's dead to me now.

Lower your resolution?

I have a computer like that, but you need way more than 12 GBs of RAMs to squeak more performance out of the Pudding, so unless you have enough RAMs to cram the entire thing into a RAMdisk, it won't help much.

You argue that 12GB RAM is overkill, it probably is, but so is a 2 or 3 x SLI GTX570 graphics set-up, and an i9 hexacore processor overclocked to some ridiculous speed, but people still do it.

One thing here: you need more than just "a bit extra" RAM.  On Windoze 7 and Vista, the OS and background tasks can easily use up 2GB of RAM.  Granted, on XP, it's much less, but still fairly sizable (at least 300MB).  But yes, 12 GB is way overkill.  I've never been known to use more than 6GB or so of RAM, and I run a shitload of stuff at the same time.

What's wrong with having 12GB of RAM if you have twin triple-channels and you want it?

Back on the subject of upgrades, is a Radeon 5770, with 1 GB of dedicated memory, enough to play this stupid game? My poor ickle laptop can no longer handle the game and expansions, even on low settings. After an hour, the game starts pixelating and my laptop feels like it's going to burninate to a crisp. My laptop is a piece of shit Compaq that's about 3 years old, with integrated graphics, an Intel Core 2 duo processor, and 3 GB of RAM. Once I get my tax return, I'm building a mid-range gaming desktop for playing TS3 and Civ V. I'm looking at the 5770, as well as the new 2600k i7 Intel Sandy Bridge processor, and 12 GB of RAM. I'll be hooking it up to a 42" LED tv via HDMI for playing.

I use both frameworks too. I use the /Program Files/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 directory specifically for Awesomemod because it's my core mod; the other framework for objects/combined .package store stuff so I don't have to uninstall them every time I patch or get a new expansion. So... yeah. It works.

I do believe the resoucre.cfg is supposed to be IN the mods folder.

Heavens, an Internet Tough Person! Protect me, I feel faint.

What the hell are you on about?  Sims works fine on my machine because I shelled out for a top model gaming machine.  It's just a fact that TS3 is a badly written piece of trash and puts all load on the CPU instead of the GPU, so an average computer not really designed for running power-hungry games on it running TS3 will feel the burn literally whilst a well specced computer may not notice that it's being overprocessed and can handle the abuse.  I aint sputing garbage or quoting what may have been written elsewhere, I am telling you facts and it aint just with TS3 it's with all Sim games and SimCity 4 is just as crap.

And let's face it, awesomemod can only do so much.  Yeah it'll clean up a lot of the crap that the game ends up just dumping here and there and make the game more playable, but it isn't a magic wand that's gonna fix every damned thing that's wrong with TS3 and the way it got designed.

You can go and live in your own fantasy world and deny that TS3 is so badly written that it can fry a standard home computer, or that if you get a whopping big supercomputer that suddenly the game will improve beyond its maximum performance.  I aint a hot-headed teenage moron who thinks he's ace at everything that many of you appear to be.  How about rather than trying to pretend you're ace at everything and sputing bullshit back at people who are trying to talk sense that you go do something you're really good at which is finding some photoshopped artwork from failblog and spamming topics with them.

It's frickin' Sims, if you're gonna get aggressive over a virtual dolly house then you need to get a life and some fresh air.

Problem was only solved when I did a registry cleanup, reinstalled TS3 and all its expansions ensuring each got updated, and then started with a fresh new 'hood with very few mods.  All I got now is awesomemod and Buzz's fixes for excavation sites and bad mood, and all legit downloads of TS3 store stuff.  So far been a few days, I'm well into my 2nd generation, had no issues except some sims being stuck in a loop that needed resetting as they were causing the game to lag every 3 seconds, and a few LN bugs with sims not able to use the elevators and no bartenders.  They were easily fixable though so nothing major yet.

See, now you're just being silly. Who actually lets anything auto-install these days? I can honestly say that I have never accidentally installed a browser homepage setting or search function

I will go and read.

Merlin, tizerist - I am aware of those sorts of programs. I try not to add them in. I also clean out my startup file (as neccessary) and check for strange processess after adding new programs.

Pescado isn't confused by the graph, he just wants a different one.

This is an extremely misleading picture. It is important to firstly, identify how long the WARRANTY is, and secondly, the CAUSES of the failures. I would rather buy a computer that has a 100% chance of failing during the warranty period than a computer which will most likely fail shortly AFTER the warranty. Additionally, CAUSE of the failure is important. A motherboard/chipset/CPU failure is merely mildly annoying, as long as they occur within warranty. Make sure they do, even if you have to abuse it harder. Hard drive failures are very bad, but also preventable by identifying the brand of the hard drives they install and replacing them. It is important to identify how time-to-failure correlates with the warranty period, so you can subject the laptop to the correct amount of abuse to ensure failure within that period. Remember: All laptops die. What matters is how likely you can kill it within the warranty period. Malfunction rates are irrelevant: What MATTERS is the quality of warranty replacement and how much you have to do to kill it within that period.

Update on PC specs now I have them in front of me
XP Pro Version 2002 SP 3 (no mention of bits so I assume it's not 64)
Core Duo CPU @ 3GHz
3.25GB RAM (obviously what's being utilised of my 4GB)

I don't know what my MB is. It uses nvidia drivers for networking and IDE control. It was made by gigabyte is about all I can say.

Yes, I am fully aware of that. I was talking FROM MY EXPERIENCE. Did I say Macs are better than PC's? No, I did not. Did I say all PC laptops suck? No, I did not.

Let's see, I previously owned an HP Pavillion, which a)overheated like you could not imagine, and B)was about as portable as a t-Rex. Seriously, the overheating was a sight to see. It Heated our whole flat for a year, unti it finally gave up. Yes, it games, but aside from that it was no where near as good as my Mac, which cost like £750 to its £650.

The updater bat is giving me an error code 9, read the readme;


I check, 3booter is in the Late Night directory. I'm going to try and reinstall/redownload the updater manually, see what it gives me. 3booter worked on it's own.