I recently switched to an SSD, which has been AMAZING for so many things in Sims 3, but one downside is that my game is having a lot of issues since then.
I know that over time, I had done a LOT of "fixes" to make the Sims 3 run better and not crash as often, but I'm not sure what they were anymore.

The crash usually goes like this:
I'll be clunking along, and if I pop into CAS or build mode my interface will develop black regions and will be overall completely not functional.
I'll try and quickly exit to save, sometimes I get lucky and I can, but most off the game crashes with a Sims 3 has stopped working or running error.

Today I had bad luck in particular with costume parties. the first costume party my sim attended had the host in a hot dog suit that had a naked sim skin as the texture, I went in CAS and changed it to another color, then the outfit was fine, but it changed his hair color?

Then I hosted a costume party of my own and the glitch happened again to a female guest, who when I went into CAS looked like an entirely different guest. I made both sims and I'm fairly certain they don't look identical to eachother, even in costume.
The loading screen for CAS turned black as it said "Readying dressing room".
I exited CAS without doing anything to that sim, and I noticed another sim looked quite strange, (I'm guessing she was mid change to the tiger costume) and had an orange face with a dark gray mouth, and the rest of her skin took on the color of her main outfit.

Overall, it's been a case of if black interface means the game is going to crash. I remember I had this issue before on my old HD but I fixed it somehow, I just can't remember how.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Well, I'm sorry you are having problems. I'm no expert but a couple things you can try is "delete cache files". http://simswiki.info/wiki.php%3Ftit...ete_Cache_Files
I don't mess with the launcher files or thumbnails but I have deleted the downloadedsims.index file after deleting custom sims the wrong way. (use a mod, don't just delete ingame).

The other thing - Mods - if you aren't using them you should think about getting a few. Lots of information here - https://www.nraas.net/community/TIP...AME-PERFORMANCE

And after reading all those juicy tidbits, I'm going to do a few of things for my game!

Thank you for the links, I'll give that a shot. I delete all my cache files with a batch file before I play.

bear in mind that Sims 3 cache strategy is not entirely healthy for the SSD - there's a lot of writes which wear off the disk much quicker than should, with the modern ssds of reasonable quality it should not be a big problem (if the system is aware of working on ssd), but still, a caution and routinely backups are advised.

I don't know if it matters much but I have this one in a 1TB capacity:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...0?ie=UTF8&psc=1


I've had your tutorial on this open a few days, I just haven't quite had the time to sit down and do it yet. Does it make much of a difference for crashes?

It's a fresh steam install, so it's as patched as the steam installation goes.

I have no experience with steam installations, though maybe "repair" should be the 1st step (which you probably already did). Something may be messed up. Did you just cloned the partition or had fresh install on the new drive?


In regard to SSD:
this is an OK model. It has decent internal overprovisioning, proper cache for the capacity. Should do fine as long as you keep the used space below 70-80%. It's the general rule for any ssd, anyway, above that level of consumption theirs speed and internal logic starts to degrade. I'd say, especially if you use the game (and the programs with similar cache problems - namely: a lot of writes, browsers are common offenders*) very often, keep usage of the disk below 60% and set up TRIM weekly. If it's Windows 7 > machine it should already recognise the disk type (check on the "disk properties"), if not: tell it to do so. Though - if you are victim of W10 - constant updates and its telemetry (not mentioning Cortana) will slowly eats it, anyway, however it will fail eventually rather because of the age than cell wear level. Just do not abuse "hibernation" feature (and be aware that W10 "disable" is a hibernation type). Moving caches to the RAM as @nitromon suggested is not a bad idea either if you have the memory to spare.

--
*order browsers to keep theirs caches in the RAM, there is option for this in Firefox and should (?) be in Chrome/mium.

Thank you! That was very informative.
And I actually went to great lengths when I got this SSD to not get Windows 10 because I just don't like it and other games I enjoy do not play well on it.
I have OK memory, but I'll be upgrading it significantly in the next month or two.
By TRIM do you mean just delete excess junk or is this a feature I'm unaware of?

Also I did not clone my old drive, I fresh installed every program to insure if there was any damage to pre-existing files it wouldn't mess up my installs. I knew my last OS has corruption from a bad update and didn't want to take any gambles on function files.