I'm in the process of setting up a new hard drive and for the first time I have two of them. One is an SSD drive and the other is not. I've installed the program game files on the SSD drive because it's faster. If possible, I'd like to install the user game files (neighborhood, downloads etc) on the secondary drive to save space. According to this post on the sims wiki, that's possible. However, I haven't seen this type of installation covered or approved here. I don't want to install the whole game on the secondary drive since that would defeat the purpose of buying the SSD. Before I do something I really regret, like moving the entire MyDocuments folder from the boot drive to the secondary drive, I'd like to know if this sounds possible or just crazy. This is the link:Game Help:ChangeLocation of Downloads Folder

I'm using Windows 7. I have disks, not the UC. The hard drives are not fancy. The graphics card is an old Nvidia GeForce 760 (I think - not at my PC so it may be 780).

I'm so nervous about the installation alone, first time in years, that I was literally shaking this morning. So far everything has gone smoothly but I haven't loaded mods or cc files yet. Thank you so much for any help you can give.

I have the MyDocuments-folder moved to my D:drive many years ago with no problems at all. At that time I also had win 7 and discs. ( I now have UC and win 10).

You have my exact setup. Disks, Win 7, Install files on my SSD, Documents with downloads on D drive. Your graphic card sounds old but should be okay if you don't have tons of content. If its a new pc you will need the 4 GB patch, graphic rules and possibly other things, it depends. I've had a lot of pink flashing that I fixed by making my NVIDEA card take over smooth edges instead of in-game. If the PC has all old hardware you might not need to do anything.

Oh that's great! I just follow the instructions on the wiki I guess about targeting the folder and moving it? Is there anything special that the wiki instructions don't include?

When I install the game utility programs like SimPE and the clean installer, I'm assuming I install them in the D drive, is that right?

It's an old PC. I replaced the graphics card back when the Nvidia 760 was a new thing. I have over 44,000 files in my downloads folder (all compressed so the size is just over 7GB) and the game still looks beautiful to me although I know the card must be on borrowed time at this point. The hard drives are the only parts I've replaced otherwise, everything else came with the computer years ago. I'm going to get the 4 GB patch and look at the graphic rules since I have so much cc and the card is so old.

just make a link, you do not need to transfer the whole ~Documents folder


where NewFolder is the folder in which you want to put contents of the Sims 3 folder and D:\ is the 2nd drive example name;

though I'm not sure if really a hardlink is necessary there (only in POSIX systems it still relates directly to the particular sector not just inode)

Do it as privileged user (open console "as administrator"). You can do this also in GUI by making shortcut.

That's what did my old pc in, my graphic card started dying last year, throwing black spikes out of sims bodies. I would turn shadows off to conserve it since you have a lot of cc. SimPE can be installed version or the one that sits in a folder. Clean Installer you just unzip so also not installed. Just place them on whichever drive you want.

I installed SimPE etc in the MyDocuments subfolder and they work fine. However, I have another problem. There is no pavement/road in front of the lots when I'm in a lot. I copy/pasted my backup graphics.sgr file from the game I've been using all along and the road appeared but it flashed blue. Removing the new graphics.sgr file removed the blue flashing but now there's nothing but terrain. I'd attach a pic here but can't figure out how. It does that with and without CC.

I ran dxdiag and the graphics card is NVidia GeForce GTX 960. 16MB RAM

You need to make your new PC a new graphics .sgr.

I started on that running Graphics Rules Maker. Unfortunately it didn't help with the roads. I'll see if I can find bits and pieces of information about what to put in it but I guess I might be looking at the end of playing with this game, lots of years with it. I admire your perseverance! Thank you and thanks to everyone else who helped me with this.

I had to let my game re-generate the save folder after replacing the graphics rules. Have you tried that?

I got help from someone extraordinarily kind who spent hours going over the problem and we mutually decided it's probably a bad install. The game is not seeing Maxis objects like swimming pools (no longer appear in the catalog at all) or pavement or water or data like that in new graphics .sgr files (config log simply does not recognize changes) but shows no sign of overall graphic card damage either in the game or in other programs. I will be reinstalling, this time on only one drive, and see if it fixes the issues. Thank you for your help!