Troubleshooting Manager Josh would this run the sims 2 smootly or choppy

It would run the game smoothly.

 

SimCity 4 is very...erm....hard on your system, mainly RAM and video cards.
Although it runs smoothly on my 3.0GHz, 1GB RAM and my Radeon 9600 128mbs of video memory.

 

To find out what your computer specs are, go to Start, click on Run and type dxdiag in the box.

The important things are in the System Information and Display Device sections.

In System information you'll want to look at:
Operating System
Processor (model name, number and speed in either ghz or mhz)
Memory (RAM)
Direct X version (you need to make sure that you have 9.0b. If you download it, double check to make sure it's changed in the dxdiag too as sometimes a step gets missed and it doesn't get completed. Then go to the graphics card/video card's manufacturer and download the newest drivers.)

Under Display Devices you want:
Card name
Chip type
Display Memory.

The only thing left is making sure you have enough hard drive space. One of the easiest ways to figure that one out is to click on disc defrag (which is under accessories\system tools\disc defrag). Don't run it at that point, but it should show how much total space your drive has, how much is available and what the percentage used is. It's important to keep about 25% of the drive empty so that the computer has room to "manuever". So, it's bad if you only have a little space left.

From there you can completely compare your specs to the minimum specs of the game. (Remember that you should meet *all* the specs and if you only meet the specs rather than exceeding them chances are your game will run but may be jerky and not have all the texture and lighting effects that you may like.)

You can find the specs here: http://thesims2.ea.com/about_system_specs.php

This is what that page says:

The Sims 2 Minimum System Specs

If you have a T&L capable video card with at least 32 MB of video RAM (such as nvidia GeForce 2 or better or ATI Radeon 7000 or better) then you need at least:

• 600 MHz P3 processor
• 256 MB RAM if Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98 or Windows 2000
• At least 3.5 GB of hard drive space

If you have a non-T&L capable video card (such as TNT2 or Intel Integrated for example) then you need at least:

• 1.5 GHz processor
• 256 MB RAM if Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98, or Windows 2000
• At least 3.5 GB of hard drive space

Recommended video cards (and the more video memory the better):

• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
• Nvidia Geforce 4 or FX series cards

From the nVidia website's glossary
Transform & Lighting (T&L) definition: Two separate engines on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) that provide for a powerful, balanced PC platform and enable extremely high polygon count scenes. Transform performance determines how complex objects can be and how many can appear in a scene without sacrificing frame rate. Lighting techniques add to a scene's realism by changing the appearance of objects based on light sources.

Some other notes about video cards:
T&L video cards started shipping around 3 years ago, so if you got your computer in the last couple of years you should check and see if you have a T&L card.

It's always a good idea to make sure you have the most current drivers for your video cards. The manufacturers usually have the video drivers on their sites for you to download. Visit the nVidia site or the ATI for the latest drivers for those video cards.