One thing I should say...

The game runs really well on the new computer. Load times are incredible, and while I got the pause when the game generated a paper girl and a garden club member in my test neighborhood (yeah, I got my blank templates in, for everything but the three basic vacation destinations*) it wasn't very bad. Also it runs just fine in windowed mode, no slowdown at all, which was not really the case on the old box. Sims itself might not take advantage of the extra processors (I haven't really checked that, but considering my video-recording performance I'd bet it doesn't) but the OS itself seems to do it quite nicely. I do get some odd redraw lag if I open a menu when the game is running, but it goes away if I minimize the game, so whatever.

Also, my clipboard-capture program of choice has a way to assign a hotkey to do captures. I'm still probably going to play windowed for other reasons (most notably for the ability to easily look stuff up/take notes/whatever) but it's nice to be able to do it with one key combo rather than doing a key combo, switching windows, doing another key combo, etc. I can only make it take about one picture a second but I'll live. :D

(*ETA forgotten footnote: I did leave the three regular destinations as is, so that I can throw them on a neighborhood if I don't want to do the work of setting up a custom version, but I tell you, if I put in the Eastern one, I'm renaming it to the Far East Theme Park or something, because having all those alleged Asians with red hair and Euro features drives me nuts. At least if I pretend it's just a themed area and not supposed to be the "real" far East, I won't be as annoyed.)

widescreen vs the Sims

Well, I can run the Sims in widescreen, but not at my native resolution. Unfortunately, running in a non-widescreen resolution does NOT do the black bar thing; I think this particular monitor might not know how to respond to that instruction or something? I don't know.