Well my girlfriend just bought a laptop last year and she's hoping it will be able to run Sims 3.  Can anyone help me figure out if she's gonna be ok.

She has a Dell Inspiron I1420

Intel Core 2 Duo T5550

1.83 GHz

3070 MB Ram

NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

Here are the Sims 3 Requirements.

The main part I don't understand is how the dual core system affects these requirements.  Thanks in advance.

So this is very interesting. It's actually slightly steep for a Sims game (what with 2 gigs of ram or a 128mb video card), meaning that a computer for 5 or so years ago won't run it, but that's still pretty good.

P.S. Who's girlfriend is NOT wondering about Sims 3 reqs nowadays? If it wasnt for the Sims they probably would never know about RAM, video cards, and the rest of all that jazz...

She'll be fine, the CPU requirements are well under what she has. The processor it refers to is old and single core, hers is dual core. Graphics hardware is fine also.

should be fine, as should my pc, specs are lower than i thought

Thanks everyone.

Now she'll be able to sleep again.

That is, until the game comes out.

I'm pretty sure my budget PC I built 4 years ago is capable of playing this game.  This isn't much of a step up from Sims 2, IMO, in fact the only requirement for this game is to have a dedicated video card.  This actually seems pretty fair, in fact I'm amazed the requirements are so low with some of the screenshots I've seen so far.

EDIT: @op, yeah your girlfriends PC will be fine, here GPU blows away the minimum video card in the requirements on wikipedia.

You scared me for a while, I thought the specs you posted were actually the reqs, it would be pretty high. As everyone said, you'll be more than fine, you'll probably be able to play it in Med or High without any problems. The reqs are similar to Spore, and I can play that game mostly maxed (everything but shadows) with a PC that's a bit worse than yours, so you don't have to worry at all

Whats new in Sims 3?

The biggest change (for me, at least) is that the game doesn't load only your house but all the neighborhood, so you can go wherever you want seamlessly, everyone ages with you

According to wiki

On March 19, 2008, EA revealed a new feature to The Sims 3 which was neighborhood exploration. Sims can now explore the world outside their homes without having to face strenuous loading times. Every lot is now synced to the main neighborhood time, whereas before the time of day (and weather) was different in each lot and would continue off from the last time it was played. Players can also interact with every building in a neighborhood.^[11] Players can also roam around with other sims while others in the family will take care of themselves more easily.

I'd recommend the Wikipedia article on the game, they have a good detailed explanation of all what's new and tweaks made

That 1Gb for additional content is a lie. I've put gigs of stuff into my games for Sims 1 & 2 so the 3rd should be even more.