In the sentence "Your post was even worse then the subject of your post.", "then" should be "than".  If you are going to be a language prick, you should be a vigilant language prick.

I played Sims 3 for a couple of months and then gave up.  I could not make the sims I wanted to make in the Sims 3 Cas.  I like to make sims of my relatives and friends, and populate the neighborhoods with them.  I can do that with Sims 2, or at least make sims that remind me of them.  In Sims 3, the only way I can make sims look like someone is if the model already looks like a Sims 3 pudding.  I also find it boring to play sims that all look like first cousins, at the very least.  Combine that with the inferior genetics, and Sims 3 is not interesting to me.  Too bad, there are things in Sims 3 I like a lot, but they do not make up for inferior sims.

A brother and sister famaily I made and placed in the neighborhood moved out--into the ether, as far as I can tell.  Even sims I thought knew them no longer have them listed as acquaintances.  I thought this behavior had been stomped?

My neighborhood that takes a long time to save is the original Sunset, not cleaned.  TS2 aging on, and I am playing all the families.  I play each family one sim week at a time with frequent switching to check on what other families are doing.

I'll do that.  At present I have completed disk cleanup and started defrag at 8 am--it is 10 am here now, and is 30% done.  I'm glad to hear it may be possible to play many families--I'm obsessive about my games.

Voodoo, then.  Do you suppose long saves relates at all to how many families in the neighborhood you play?  I play every family in game, and add more of my own.  I had thought that once Pescado had story mode whipped I would switch to playing 5 or 6 families and turn off TS2 style aging, but saves are increasing so rapidly I fear for the state of the game itself, and think I might have to go back to TS2.  It took forever to load but that was after years of play, installing all but one of the expansion packs, and tons of custom content.

Oh well, off to defrag.

Thank you, JBoat, I'll defrag tomorrow morning and quiz my husband and friend about the hard disk subsystem.

Thanks, I'll check out these things--should have enough RAM though--both my husband and a computer expert friend say that I have humongous amounts of RAM.

edit:  I can figure out how to check everything but the "sufficient and static windows paging file set correctly"  How do I do this and what should the correct values be?

Moondance, my game with Awesome mod installed, takes 25 minutes to save.  So I would like to try Indie mod--do you uninstall Awesome when you want to play the Indie neighborhood?  If so, can I do that when I have Supreme Commander enabled?  I've checked out the Indie mod, and though it looks good, would rather use Awesome, but if Indie will reduce my save times I may soon have no choice.

The Running with Scissors Playset.  I loved how random it was, and used to use it to cull my population.

Have scrolly wheel.

Ditto