Sims 3 Not Working

[margsanxhez]

Hi,

I'm a long time The Sims player and have had the Sims 3 for at least 5 years. This is the first time ever I've felt the need to ask for help on a forum like this. On the old computer I had, I had some custom content installed and sometime a while ago the game stopped working. Originally I thought that was the problem, but since getting a new laptop I've realized that isn't the issue. Sims 3 will launch to the screen with the play button, installed content, etc etc. But, when I click the play button it only loads for a second and then brings the EA app back up and adds about a minute to my playtime.

I've tried doing about everything I can in order to fix Sims 3; I've uninstalled and reinstalled, repaired, installed DX (as per suggestion from another post I had looked up), and I even made an entirely new account and rebought the Sims 3 to no avail. I'm unsure what the issue is but I have seen some people say to post dxdiag with posts like these so I'm going to have that linked. Please help!

[DeadofWinter321 · Accepted solution]

I had that issue when I got my Dell gaming laptop (running Windows 11).  What fixed it (and you unfortunately have to do this every time you want to launch the game) was after I pull up the Sims 3 launcher, you press CTRL+ALT+DELETE, pull up the Task Manager and then right-click Sims Launcher under Apps, click Go to details and then locate Sims3Launcher.exe, scroll to Set affinity and make sure only one one CPU is checked (for me, there was CPU 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4) then go back to the Sims 3 launcher and press the Play button again.  That worked for me.

[SwegKongSam16]

@margsanxhez Do you have sertain mods installed, some mods can cause that issue

[puzzlezaddict]

@margsanxhez  Even though your laptop doesn't have an Alder Lake CPU, the Sims 3 errors in your dxdiag match the Alder Lake ones.  So please try one of the interventions in the accepted solution of this thread:

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues-PC/Sims-3-won-t-open-Alder-Lake-Intel-12th-gen-CPU/td-p/1...

However, your laptop also has very little free storage (and very little overall), and accordingly a small page file.  Because it also only has 4 GB RAM, the page file is critical for overflow data, especially since Sims 3 can use over 3 GB memory on its own.  I'm honestly not sure how well you'll be able to play on this computer.  I'll still try to help, but please understand that there may be a limit to what you can accomplish here.  At the very least, you'll need to free up some storage, maybe another 15 GB if you can.

[DeadofWinter321 · Accepted solution]

I had that issue when I got my Dell gaming laptop (running Windows 11).  What fixed it (and you unfortunately have to do this every time you want to launch the game) was after I pull up the Sims 3 launcher, you press CTRL+ALT+DELETE, pull up the Task Manager and then right-click Sims Launcher under Apps, click Go to details and then locate Sims3Launcher.exe, scroll to Set affinity and make sure only one one CPU is checked (for me, there was CPU 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4) then go back to the Sims 3 launcher and press the Play button again.  That worked for me.