I hope you'll be back to read this anyway. I don't have an answer to your question but I can still help you to find out what the difference is.

First, play a few weeks or months with awesomemod. Note: first with awesomemod. Then remove it and play. You'll notice the difference in a few hours if you pay any attention to anything. Actually, it works so well you might not even see the difference but somehow the gaming experience has turned a little less frustrating.

If you have trouble understanding the manual, maybe you could ask someone to read it with you and explain? After all, supposedly it's a grown-up who develops the mod and writes the manual - and grown-ups tend to use fine words and expressions to show they are somewhat educated.

I think these people are only hostile for the fun of it (I'm sure they have only ran wild with anonymity and aren't quite this way IRL). Don't mind them 'cause you're here for the mods, not making friends.

My guy knows a guy, who did a little tweaking and was able to cut Sims 2 from sending empty packages (don't know what that means, but I guess it has something to do either with the processor or the memory ). He was running the game for his girlfriend on some kind of a windows games emulator on linux on mac -thingy and got the game running smoothly. The only problem was the having a mac with linux on it -part; and he compiled the os himself. That would be a pretty hard thing for us non-techies to do.. I wonder if that could be done on Sims 3, with some genious programming skills.

Oh. Of course I wouldn't have told that unless I heard it from someone who gets paid doing that. But he doesn't play Sims or isn't familiar with the.. ehem.. efforts EA makes with their products and he only suggested it. Well, knowing what you know saved me the ever painful reinstalling my wormbox.

My setting, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6400+ ~3.2GHz, 3072MB RAM, directX10 (XP 3rd party) and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512, is decent for running the game. My save times are horrid too, after adding some stuff it went up to 15 minutes.

After clearing everything, except Awesome, the save time went down to, say, ten minutes. I've cleared the townies and NPC's down as much as I could and I only have 13 families in town, all other lots are empty.

Now, I'm not a computer wiz or anything, but I think it has something to do with the hard disks, their writing speeds? Mine are Samsung POS with 7200 rpms or something... I heard that RAID 0ing your hard drives might ease up playing Sims 3 (and 2 too), but I haven't had the guts to test it yet since it requires a full computer re-set.