Hi everyone!! Apologies if this has been asked before, but:
For my birthday I got the base game and all the Sims 3 expansion discs second hand. I know that installing all of them would be risky because I don't have a high-end computer (I have about a lower middle range laptop), so I got to work only installing a few of the expansion packs and installing a bunch of mods that would help lag and errors. Unfortunately every time I open my game, I get Error 126- once I close the notification the game starts as normal. I know that it's caused by the smooth patch by LazyDuchess, and I've installed both the 64 and 86 bit versions of the VC redistributables, but I'm still getting this error. I'm super confused. I'm not the best at this stuff and all the mods this game needs is so hard to keep up with!! If anyone could lend some advice I would appreciate it so much. Thank you!!!!

what type of visual c++ did you install? Smooth Patch requires VC 2015 both x86 and x64. Perhaps try to get Visual C++ 2015-2022 x86 and x64 and see if it works.

I've made sure to get the newest version of VC 2015! I also have both x64 and x86. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling it a bunch too. I'm really confused.

That's odd. I'm playing the Sims 3 with smooth patch on Windows 7 and have installed VC 2015-2022 x86 and x64 with no issue, although I have installed every visual c++ available out of Microsoft.

You may want to install every VC from 2005 to 2015-2022 both x86 and x64. If that doesn't help too, then I don't know what's going on with your installation.

Unfortunately the downloads for all the older VCs are unavailable. I think it's a lost cause I'm not sure if reinstalling the entire game would work and going through that effort sounds like hell right now. It's such a shame as my game is pretty laggy.