You should check out this post and read up on everything. But I haven’t, and I find that the 4GB patch and the Graphics Rules Makes is all it takes to have the game behave on my machine.
4GB patch
Sims 2 only uses 2GB of RAM by default. I myself have 32GB of RAM in my machine and it’s annoying that it just won’t use more of it. The thing is, 2GB isn’t enough for the game! When it runs out of memory, it crashes.
Running the 4GB Patch will help with this. You NEED it!
Graphics Rules Maker
The game is very old and won’t automatically be able to utilize your “new”, fancy graphics card. And this can cause pink flashes and even crashes. Here’s a video on how to fix it! You should do the Graphics Rules part even if your game appears to be fine.
Links:
I only used the Graphics Rules Maker, and that fixed my game
Beautification of neighborhoods
This is not needed for getting the game to run, but it is very nice to have a lot of these, so here is Pleasantsims video for making the game prettier! Personally I skipped the trees because they don’t bother me too much and they take up a lot of RAM.
Avoiding “corruption”
Now that you got your game all nice and neat, we can just do whatever, right? Well, there is a few things you should know that could prevent you from having a pleasant experience. It’s known in the community as corruption, but what it is really, is references to deleted things in the game. Back in the day, it seems like error handling was not huge among developers, so they just referenced things in code, and if that thing was no longer there, the whole program would just crash.
The most common thing is a memory referencing a sim. If a sim tries to think about their experience, they want to show a thought bubble of the sim involved. If that sim was deleted, the game will simply crash. Delete enough sims, and you won’t get far before a crash happens and in the end feel like you can’t play for fear of crashing and losing progress. It feels like your game is “corrupted”.
I feel like I’m only referencing PleasantSims videos, but they are really informative and well structured, so here’s her video about what not to ever do!