Please help!

I've been playing Skyrim for a few months without issue -- character is level 38.

Suddenly, today, I'm getting very frequent crashes to desktop -- usually when I'm in major cities. Often just after fast travelling, but can also happen while I'm running/sprinting through town. It may not be related by my sprint function (ALT) has gotten a little sticky-glitchy today, too.

I've tried lowering various setting (shadows, anti-aliasing, etc). Seemed to help a little but not much -- or that may have been coincidence. Screen resolution is at the lowest setting. I read on other fora that sometimes the size of individual game files could be problematic, if they're near 18MB -- mine are all under 10MB (though I tried the sleep-for-7-days fix that was recommended to help that, just in case). I've read that some mods can be problematic, but I'm only running one small mod -- the one that make veils of ore glow, so you can spot them easily -- and the problem never happens when I'm out in the wilderness near ore veils, so I think it's unrelated.

Anyone? Anything? I'd be very grateful for any suggestions. Ideally couched in human-speak, rather than computer-speak ... I'm only semi-computer literate.

Welcome to the forums, EJMdesign!

Can you post some specifics about your computer? Especially the graphics card that you have.

Graphics card is an NVidia GEForce 8600 GT -- I updated the driver when I started playing Skyrim.
Computer is:
Intel(R) Core(TM) 2Quad CPU
2.40 Ghz
3.25 GB RAM
Running Windows XP

And thank you, BTW -- appreciate you responding!

What level of graphics are you playing on? I want you to put your graphics on the lowest setting and then try to replicate the crash. If it happens again then it's a bit more likely that it's not related to the graphics card.

Graphics are, alas, already on the lowest setting!

Hmm. Nothing has changed at all recently? It shouldn't just randomly start happening out of nowhere. Usually when it's as random as that then the problem is more than likely dealing with hardware.

Nothing at all. I'd had a very occasional CTDs before today ... maybe once every 3 or 4 hours of gameplay. Annoying, but hardly unplayable. All of a sudden today, it became constant.

Try using the ENBSeries mod to see if it'll help relieve the CTD. It's made specifically for that problem. If that doesn't help then you really might have hardware issues.

Thanks for the suggestion ... I'll give that a try!

I have the mobile version of that graphics card. I spent the entire holiday season tweaking for best performance.

THE ENB SERIES MAKES THINGS SLOWER. None of the post-process injector mods or anything that uses a .dll file to improve performance has helped, in many cases it has made things worse. Ditto for TESVAL, Skyboost, etc. These are all for higher specced machines.

FOR THIS OLD GRAPHICS CARD: It is much better to: a) use the NVidia control panel to optimize graphics for the game , and b) make some judicious tweaks to the .ini files if you can.

I've been running at 900x630 quite smoothly with distances maxed out , hiqh quality textures, 2x anti-aliasing, 2x Anisotropic Filtering

Read:

http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide

Yeah....once I saw how much better the animation is on higher end systems I got my wallet out to get a faster machine.

A quick not-too technical fix to most problems
seems to be to run Skyrim launcher and :
-Click Options
-FIRST reset graphics settings by clicking on "Medium" ,
-then turn off Anisotropic Filter
-set Antialiasing to off or 2
-turn down the resolution to the minimum.
-Go into Advanced and ensure the FXAA box is UNTICKED.

This won’t give the best possible quality/performance but it should make it possible to run and play without problems.

There is of course the very real possibilty that your Windows system is suffering from another of the many possible things that can bork Windows, especially WIndows XP if you go online with it.

Those fix mods just bundle common routines into a .dll for faster access, so it shouldn't slow things down unless you have a low amount of memory (or if they used virtual memory then a slow rpm HDD), low end CPU, or your GPU can't handle that many pipelines.

Regardless, the fact that the problem came out of the blue seems to signify hardware issues. If something was changed or her OS upgraded then i'd be more inclined to think it was a "software" issue. That's why I recommended a change in how Skyrim handled fetching. It's great that she may be able to play on high now by following that guide though, but if the problem isn't related to her GPU overheating then that might not fix it. Hopefully it does fix it.

Thank you, Skullrattla and Finalchrono both! I really appreciate your feedback, and your willingness to take the time to respond.

I'm going to be away from my computer today, but I'll explore all of this tomorrow. I think I'll work through Skullrattla's list first, since it was generated using the same video card, and if that doesn't fix it, I'll try the enb series -- if that turns out to makes things worse instead of better, I can always remove it. I'll post my results.

Again, much gratitude for your time! It's reassuring just to have a plan to try. My computer skills are marginally adequate for getting through day-to-day stuff, but this problem was way beyond me. And I didn't want to abandon the game! I've been in love with the Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind (still my favorite game of all time, if the truth be told).