What should be the optimum settings to play sims 3?

Best thing to lower without raping the way the game looks is anti alaising in most cases as it has the biggest lag impact for a single option in pretty much any game...don't know if sims has this graphics option, 2gb ram is a biy fail for a vista machine though, I couldn't imagine a game on vista with less than 3gb...my XP machine has 2, your computer seems kind of out dated to be honest if you play many games i'd recommend buying a new one...i7 will become standard for running max settings within the next year (to run new games) as it already is with witcher 2 and final fantasy 14 require i7's, 3-4gb ram, a dx 11 graphics card (yours is dx9, and not even a high end one) if you don't wish to spend much but still want the most out of your games you should look into getting something like a dual core E5300 or E5500 intel processor with geforce 9500 gt or 240/245, 3 gb ram and sata hard drives is pretty much minimum requirement at the minute...that is probably the requirement to max sims 3 settings.