I've found my laptop was running pretty slow lately and some programs had been disabled, so I reformatted it. I just reinstalled Sims 3 and now it seems to be running very, super-duper slow. It's never been fast, but this seems incredibly slow.

It took 2 minutes to get to the home screen, and then 17 minutes to load my save file. This is just the vanilla save (12 files = 800mb). I haven't even put in any of my mods or download content yet. Is it supposed to take that long? I'm several generations in, maybe I have to do something to clean up the files?

What I'm working with:
OS: Windows 7 - Home Edition.
Processor: AMD A6-3420M APU with Radeon HD Graphics 1.50 GHz.
Installed RAM: 6.00 GB (5.48 usable).
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6250G, 4043MB of total memory, driver version 8.903.0.0.
Drivers: ... Probably outdated now that I think about it. Any suggestions how to get these?

You have two issues. One is the bloat of your save file. The total size isn't so important, but what is the size of nhd file inside of the world actively being played? That's the one that is loaded up into RAM on startup and travel transitions.

If you are on Patch 1.67 or lower, you can use Kuree's Save Cleaner to cleanup your save files.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Kuree's+Save+Cleaner

If you are on Patch 1.69, that won't work but there are other ways.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Deleting+SNAP+resources+FAQ
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/How+to+...+your+save-game

The other problem is that your processor and graphics card are not strong enough to handle TS3 properly. I'm actually impressed that you can get the game to launch, but that would also be a function of how many EPs you are throwing at it. Presumably a newly started game runs better than what you have described?

@Igazer:
-It updated to 1.67.2.024002 but not 1.69, so I was able to run the Save Cleaner.
-Before: The .nhd file was 106MB.The whole folder was 809.49MB.
-After: The .nhd file is now 38.3MB. Folder size is down to 704.70MB.
-Sadly, it took 23 minutes to load now. Which doesn't make sense, so

-I tried turning Visual Effects, Lighting & Shadows, Draw Distance, Texture Detail settings down. Now boot-time is down to about 18.5 minutes.

-Oh, don't tell me I gotta start a brand new game! It took me ages to get this far in a challenge, I'll never be able to do it again.

-My laptop is a few years old, at least 3 or 4. Maybe it's time to start looking for a new one. I know my friends used to say games work better on a tower machine, is this still the case?

-Also, I'm kindof a virtual hoarder; with all the items, inventions, paintings, gems, cut stones, perfect produce, nectar, statues, etc. Maybe if I spent a few hours deleting things it would make things go faster?

@Nitromon:
-I copied the Save folder, but I haven't copied over the Mods folder yet. The only thing I installed was the neighbourhood, Lucky Palms.

-I kindof thought this would crash the game or something. I got a warning right away that some content was missing and replaced. But I played a few sim hours and nothing terrible happened*. A lot of my mods were fixes, NRAAS, action tweaks, cars, or cosmetic stuff, so I guess the game just replaced whattever it needed to.
*Except 2 Simbots are missing faces, but it could've been so much worse..

-But I'm not planning on saving a game in this state though, because I'd lose whattever content was there before and all the settings would be lost. This "clean-slate" approach is kindof helpful because one of the Ambitions ghosts spawned on my home lot, for a long time I can't build there.

From one virtual hoarder to another: yes. Removing/selling a lot of the excess cut stones, inventions, paintings, insects, nectar bottles, statues, dive wells, potions, "Travel necessities," produce, etc. probably would help a little bit. (As long as you really are as bad as I am and the clean-out cuts another 5 MB from your save file. It did help me, anyway.) I've heard that not keeping more than 3 or 4 gnomes also helps, but it's hard to manage.... (They are so cute, they keep turning up, they reproduce if you have Generations.... I'm seriously trying not to develop another collection of 57 active gnomes, but I'm up to 10 now. Not counting the one who seems to have teleported just off the edge of the lot.)

I've been working on cleaning out the lot, but it's so hard to part with things! My OCD brain also wants to keep duplicates of each item, which doubles or sometimes quintuples the number of items I'm keeping. ie: Keeping 5 raw Rubies, 5 Emerald-Cut Rubies, 5 Heart-Shaped Rubies, etc.

2 more questions:
-I'm thinking of putting excess inventory into an empty lot which I store in the bin, and delete from the neighbourhood. Specifically the World Adventures items, the Ambitions items, & the Custom Paintings. Probably the Gems & Rocks too. Then without any custom paintings I can use the CleanSaver regularly to remove excess space. Or am I misunderstanding how the game stores things?

-I've bought most of the community lots on my game, & added new items to upgrade them to level 3. Would this slow down the game too? Are community lots separate files the game loads when you visit, or do they need to load up when you load a save? And ifso should I restore the vanilla buildings, rebuy them, and expensify them with a single, expensive object instead of many little ones?

Technical side of view, 2 minutes to get to the home screen, with AMD A6-3420M APU @ 1.50 GHz, 6gb ram is not so bad actually, considering you have WA AM and LN installed, your Radeon HD 6250G is not bad either, I personally considers your GPU is good enough for the graphic, you can get medium setting for the graphic, but the problem with AMD APU is; it has small L2 cache, only 1MB L2 cache and there's no L3 cache, it's a quad core processor with 4 threads, the base speed is 1.5ghz but it actually has turbo boost up to 2.4Ghz, so it's not bad, the only weakness is, its small cache memory, 1MB L2 cache for quad cores means 256kb per core, so I'd say 2 minutes it's quite normal with brand new total re-installation. Your driver might be out of date, but if it's the proper one it don't really matter, it just need an update.

17 minutes to load your saved file, I see your problem is with the loading time, and you didn't mentioned if you're having lags/freezes so I assumed your gameplay can also be considered good then, so I think what you need to do is to clean up your saved file, after you're done cleaning up, since you have 6gb of RAM, try using RAMDisk to help speed up to load your saved game, make about 1GB in RAMdisk, and put your saved game in the RAMDisk, just the saved game, unless you can reduced your saved game size significantly you may as well put some other from your TS3 docs folder to your RAMdisk, if you still not satisfied with the result, try starting a new game for comparison, compares loading time of your saved game from RAMDisk vs a new game from your HDD, so you can get the picture how to get the best out of your laptop spec with this game, hope that helps

Edited: Sorry I looked at the wrong specification at your APU, your L2 cache is actually 4MB, 4x1MB, but no L3 cache, 1MB per core, so it's not bad actually, source: http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K10/A...20A6-3420M.html, if you're planning on upgrade, you can try with adding more rams and replace your HDD with SSD.