Hey everyone,

First-time poster here, the community seems really helpful so I'm hoping someone a little more tech-savvy can help me out.

Up until recently, my Sims 3 was so slow, the lag was terrible. My computer doesn't have much in the way of internal memory, and with all of the expansions (and too much custom content- eep) installed, my computer had less than 2GB of memory left. It would take well over an hour just to boot the game up, and for a long time I lost interest in playing because it was just so slow.

My computer has a secondary storage drive though, sort of like an external harddrive but inside the computer, and that's where I install most of my games. I once tried to install Sims 3 on that drive instead of in my C: drive, quite a few years ago, but it didn't work. Recently, on a whim I tried to install it on the terabyte drive again (and culled back the amount of custom content I have installed!), and it worked perfectly. I should also mention that this installation was the first time installing digital copies through Origin. I purchased the base game and all of my expansions on disk, but in an attempt to downsize, I registered all my game keys and disposed of the disks and packaging. I'm not sure if that's relevant to my troubles at all, but I thought I should mention it. Anyway, my game has never run so fast, and I've quickly become addicted to the game all over again.

(the file path, if it helps, is: "F:/Games/The Sims 3 Collection/The Sims")

The trouble is that Create-A-World no longer works for me. I love making custom Sims 3 worlds of my own, especially making ones that use (and thematically support) content from all the expansions so that I never miss out on any game content. I expected this would probably happen since the games were now installed on two different harddrives, so I backed up all my saves for CAW, uninstalled it, and reinstalled it in the same parent folder on the same drive as the game, under "F:/Games/The Sims 3 Collection/The Sims 3 Create A World Tool". Unfortunately, this didn't work either. When I try to open CAW, I seem to get two completely separate error messages:





I've browsed around the forums a bit and have found some fixes for both those error codes individually, but I feel like my situation is a bit more unique. I'm hoping someone here who knows a bit more about custom installation might be able to point me in the right direction! I'd be very grateful.

I read your forum terms carefully to try not to step on anyone's toes or annoy everyone, so I've tried to provide as much information as I can, but if anything else is needed I'll do my best to find any other information.

Games installed (all official, legitimately purchased versions):
Base Game, WA, Ambitions, Late Night, Generations, Pets, Showtime, Supernatural, Seasons, UL, IP, and ITF. I also have High End Loft Stuff, Master Suite Stuff, Fast Lane Stuff, and 70s, 80s & 90s Stuff.\

Game version:
1.69.43.024017

System:
Windows 7 Home Premium
8GB RAM
64-bit OS
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz (4CPUs), ~3.4GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660

**Update**: I had been fiddling around with the installation of CAW before posting this thread. Just now when I tried to boot the Sims up, Origin told me I'd need to re-install the base game. I'm not sure what happened there, but I did so. Now when I try to boot up CAW, it only gives me one of the error messages:




The error message about being unable to find game data doesn't show up anymore. I must have accidentally removed something important when I was fiddling with the CAW installation.

Hey everyone,

I did some more digging and found out that it had nothing to do with my installation path and entirely everything to do with CAW apparently having a heart attack when patch 1.69 came out. I found this official forum thread , downloaded the version of CAW linked by SimGuruDrake, and now it's running! I hope this might be helpful to someone else in the future.

Stay beautiful x