When I boot up Skyrim from steam, it opens the launcher and detects my settings. When I hit play, nothing happens. I found away around this, just using tesv.exe but it crashes every 30-45 minutes without an error when i do that. any help? it doesn't seem to be predictable.

One thing that worked for me is checking game integrity. Right click on the game within steam, properties, and from there you will find it.

My problem was loading a saved level. Good luck.

See this list of tweaks. The important one is regarding the sound settings. The list of gfx tweaks is already on a post
in the forums here but it is the sound one which stopped the crashing for me.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/11/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweaks-improve-graphics-disable-vsync-change-fov-and-more/