I accidentally deleted the ccmerged.package and when I loaded the game, after reading this, I went to my DCackup folder and the game made a new one.
Also, @ OP, try installing ErrorTrap from Nraas. It also may be good if you disconnect from the internet before playing the game. I suggest that you also delete the pictures in the Featured Items folder. They're pretty useless. My game functions fine without it.

Figures. This PC was only meant to last me like 3 years anyways. I'm supposed to upgrade soon. What exactly should I look for that would be good to run both TS2 and TS3?

You're going to want:

An i5 or i7 processor
At least 6 GB of RAM
A dedicated graphics card (I'm not well versed enough to suggest particular ones; goggling whatever card you're looking at will get you reviews and such though)
and a DVD drive if you still have physical copies and don't want to rebuy them digitally.

Lenovo, Acer, and Asus tend to be better brands. Of course Alienware has laptops only meant for gaming, but they cost a pretty penny. Don't ever buy a Dell do you know how many Dells have crapped out on me over the years.

I use a Lenovo Y510P myself and it works great, but I'm not sure if that model's still being made.

I'm somewhat... vaguely... sure... that there was some tutorial, in some place? I think Tumblr (but probably in other places too) that in my fuzzy memory clearly stated that there was a way to enable to game to read more RAM if you for example had 16GB, and your game was only reading what... that... EA patch (the number I cannot recall right not, conveniently enough) that changed the game to read... err... 2GB only if you had 4GB, or 4GB if you had 8GB... cannot recall that either

Sorry I can't remember much more, but maybe it rings someone's bell.

IMO, a very good video card and abundant RAM are strong pillars in helping TS3 run correctly.

and I don't know if it was mentioned in this thread, but I recommend strongly to get a FPS limiter.

I would start with uninstalling the new packs I got if it's crashing after installing them because an issue that started with new installs is likely caused by faulty copies of the new packs.You should've installed one and tested for issues before installing a second and testing that one.You'd know which one is the issue if you'd installed one at a time and tested each one.I had an issue like that once after installing World Adventures and found out it was a faulty copy and returned it for a new disk and the new copy is working.It happened again with Supernatural and that was a faulty disk and I had to uninstall and replace Supernatural to get it reinstalled and the new copy installed properly.