What does Tinker actually do, apart from breaking objects?  Just a non-book way of raising Handiness, at the cost of breaking stuff?

I had my Handy sim tinker on things a lot, assuming that it would unlock additional upgrade recipes or something, but didn't actually find anything.

Really?  I can't even see other family "saves" on the map...  Maybe this is caused by tight pants issues.  I will poke around.

I've had Progression toggled off and Free Will on the medium setting forever.  There have been no spontaneous babies to my knowledge; in fact, the only one I've ever seen is a mother with a toddler in the park on occasion.  I once got a phone call announcing that $random_old_townie wasn't going to live forever, you know, and then another call the next day announcing that she'd keeled over.

I haven't been keeping up with the newspaper, unfortunately, so I can't say whether these things are happening without my knowledge or not.

I just installed my Reloaded version on my Win7 machine and it's working fine.  Better than I hoped, in fact, even though it's the "spare parts" machine made up of all the best parts of prior computers.

Do ghosts persist between "saves"?  Given that the new game seems to strongly discourage any interaction between player-made sim families, I wonder if even ghosts stay on a lot if I sacrifice them all and then move another CAS family in...

High level Criminal career - Thief branch sims get the option to Sneak Around also.  I'm not entirely sure what the utility of sneaking is, though.  Might help swipe things if you have Klepto, but otherwise, I dunno.

'kaching' still works for 1000 simoleons.  Typing 'help' into the console will get you a list of commands, but none of them looked terribly inspiring.

There may be more, but I haven't taken the time to delve into them.

I have to say I'm kind of liking TEH HORROR thus far.  There are a few obvious annoyances, but all in all the game is quite enjoyable, moreso than Sims 2.

For me, the major cons are:

• the general ugliness of sims - it's hard to make a non-ugly face, and the townies have clearly not even bothered.
• Holy obesity, batman - no offense to persons of the large persuasion, but I almost freaked out when I saw the extent of the fat slider
• Bodies are not really all that customizeable - I guess I can't realistically wish for something like Spore's editor, but they need a lot more than just those two sliders
• Heinously limited clothes/furniture - their plan to nickle-and-dime sims players to death with their online store rears its ugly head.

However, I quite like the gameplay, and I love how you can just zoom out and look around town with no loading.  Oh, how I loathed loading in the Sims 2.  My poor sims were lucky if they got to visit a community lot once in their entire existence.  This new one, I can have my fitness sims jog down to the outdoor chess table, practice chess and meet several random townies all at the same time.  I also quite like the traits system, although there are a few I wonder if anyone would ever take.  The new wants and moods are neat as well, although I wish they'd be a little more consistent about spawning new ones; sometimes sims can go awhile without developing any strong desires for anything, it seems.  This is likely realistic, but it does cut down on my micro-goal rewards.

I do miss all the random crazy crap I had downloaded for the other game, but as it is, playing "normal" sims as opposed to the melange of aliens and fairies and whatnot I usually end up with is something of a change.  We'll see how long it lasts. :p

My antivirus chirped on on the crack .exe in the Razor torrent currently on Demonoid.  I wound up grabbing a Pirate Bay-tracked Reloaded one.  There was a somewhat unusual Sims3Setup.exe in there, but none of this codec.exe/etc stuff inside, just usual file components (and a Verisign certificate, for whatever that's worth).

Also, note that the "official" setup, at least in the clean version, launches out of Autorun.exe.  My guess is that it's made for the ease of computer newbies who don't know how to activate a setup program.  I'm not entirely certain how that relates to the installation of SecureRom, though.  It's possible that if someone did write another installer for the game, they did it to stop it from installing the copy protection.  Or it might just be an unfinished installer the devs were working on.  Or it could just be a virus.  Who knows.