Do the sims have to work every single day

Duelling Vicki Vampiriess and winning awards you Magicoins. According to this page, the maximum output is 40 coins per duel. IGN cheats gives some pointers on how to beat Vicki Vampiriess:

• If she casts Blue Tornado, cast Red Wave or White Lightning;

• If she casts Yellow Brimestone, cast Black Blizzard or Blue Tornado;

• If she casts Red Wave, cast Yellow Brimestone or White Lightning;

• If she casts Black Blizzard, cast Red Wave or Blue Tornado;

• If sh casts While Lightening, cast Yellow Blizzard or Black Blizzard.

Also according to IGN, you can evict a family from their home and move them back in. When you do so, the Mystery Man will come to your house and drop a Magico starter kit which contains 35 Magicoins. You can save the coins and do this as often as you like.

You can also go to Magic Town with a Sim with maximum logic and perform on stage all day long. The maximum output from this method for a day appears to be 675 Magicoins.

As a side note, a Sim can only carry 32,767 Magicoins at once, and MagiCo's Bookshelf of Dimensional Storage will only hold 30,000. (Source)

That should be completely efficient enough to play sims 3: The system requirements are as follows:

• 2.4GHz p4 processor
• 1.5GB Ram
• 128 Mb video memory with pixel shader
• At least 6.1GB storage

Ensure that all drivers are completely up to date and that your video card drivers are installed. As suggested by ian__escobar, this may be a general problem. Attempt to play in low resolution.

Also make sure you have enough room on your hard drive, as this may also slow things down and ensure there are minimal processes running in the background.