Sims 2 lag

[PA]

I have recently upgraded my video card from a Radeon X1300 with 512MB to a Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB in an effort to collectively get my games to run better.  Most of them do, and beautifully, but Sims 2 is not doing as well as I had hoped.  Better, but it still lags.

As I do have an AMD 64 X2 dual core (2.60 GHz) and XP, many moons ago I had tried steps similar to those in this topic http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7748.0.html with some success.

The issue is that frequently the game will slow to a crawl, moving at 2 or 3 FPS for several minutes, and then for no particular reason begin working reasonably again.  Sometimes the slowdown appears to have a cause--snowfall.  I don't notice rainfall slowing the game overmuch.  Occasionally it happens when many Sims are sleeping at the same time and the timer automatically shifts to 3x speed.

I shut my extra processes down when I play so the game has as much of my computer's resources as I can give it.  It has 2.5 GB RAM and a 4 GB pagefile.  I don't have great gobs of custom content, mostly mods and hacks, though I've got some skins, hairs, etc.  No issue with it loading anyhow, it only takes a minute or so.  I have all EPs except M&G plus a few SPs. 

Question is, what else might I be able to do to speed it up?  What might cause those slowdowns?

[Solowren]

I think that's just how the game goes. I have 6 gigs of RAM and I still have a rather choppy game. I think you are right about the snow, it would make sense that that would slow the computer down.

But, yeah, I honestly just think this is what we signed up for when we installed the game.

[wizard_merlin]

As far as I can recall, TS2 doesn't support multi threading, therefore a multi-core CPU will have very little impact.  Any benefit would be that the OS may shift more of the other background tasks to the other core leaving the core running the game to focus more on that task.  That means the game is running on a 2.6 Ghz CPU, which is slightly faster the the 2.4 minimum needed for most of TS2.

The 2.5 GB of RAM is also marginal as most of TS2 request at least 2 GB, this may be causing some issues if the system uses too much and doesn't leave enough for the game to use.

Short of upgrading your RAM, I can't think of much else to try.  The slowing when the snowfall starts seems fairly standard, with higher end systems not being so noticeable, while lower end systems would show a more noticeable slowdown.  I use to also get slowdowns when in parks fishing, and it would slow more as extra sims entered the lot, that was on a borderline system.  For the most part, slowdowns seem to be a combination of poor EAxis work and system issues.