Things You Can Do To Prepare or Improve Your PC For Sims 3

Three important things to keep in mind when you want to upgrade to play a new game:

- Memory: Make sure you have plenty of memory to run the game with. Most machines nowadays run at least 1 to 4 GB of RAM. If your machine can be upgraded to handle at least 1 GB, then you can probably play Sims 3 with a few performance tweaks to make the game run more smoother.

- Hard Drive space: Make sure you have at least 5 to 10 GB of free space on your hard drive for the paging file system or virtual memory usage since the machine uses the virtual memory or paging file system to run the game with. It's sort of an extra amount of memory on top of the actual memory you have.

- Video Card: If your machine can pass the test for Sims 3 but feels weak because of the video card, maybe it is time to go out and plunk down about $50 USD for a decent video card. Both nVidia and Radeon cards are equally good with a few differences in the tools used with the video cards to improve the quality and performance of the video cards. Get a video card with at least 512 MB onboard memory if you're tight on cash.

Now is about the right time to do major maintenance on your machine in preparation for Sims 3. Few things you can do to clean up your machine and tweak it for top performance:

- Clean up the registry with a program that you can use easily to clean out the registry and clean up the junk files, browser cache and old temporary internet files.

One of the programs I use is called CCleaner, which is a free program found on cnet.com to clean up the registry, cookies, history, junk files, cache and temporary internet files.

Use google to search for registry cleaning programs and find one you like to use.

- Defrag your hard drive. Time spent defragging the hard drive is time well worth for ease of installation and ease of use of efficient hard drive space. For those of you not familiar with computer terms, defragging means basically rearranging your hard drive for better use and more space essentially.

- Uninstall any old programs you don't use anymore. This frees up a lot of space on your hard drive for more virtual memory or paging file system to be used efficiently.

- Run your anti-virus program for anything lurking about on your machine. You don't want nasty surprises while you install Sims 3, do you?

- Update your Windows version, video and sound drivers.

- Back up anything important that you want to save. Nothing is as nasty as finding out your machine has a corruption somewhere on the hard drive and forcing you to reinstall Windows.

Those are, at minimum, the things you can do to ensure that you and your machine are ready for Sims 3. I understand that the game will be a memory hog and probably a space hog as well. So be really prepared to do a lot of work if you want to play Sims 3 with minimal problems.

PM me if you have other suggestions you want to see here to help improve performance or prepare the machine for Sims 3.