so I purchased Skyrim a little while ago and I really haven't been able to get very far.

The problem is that it just incessantly crashes, sometimes within a few minutes of getting in the game, other times it might take 40 minutes but eventually, it will crash.

When I get back into the game and I run through the spot that crashed it, it doesn't crash so I continue on my game only for it to crash minutes later doing something else.

I figured it was all the mods I was running + the crappy computer.

So I just spent $2500 on a pretty nice rig (I was due for an upgrade anyway)
I downloaded my crazy amount of mods that I have running, made sure there were no conflicts, ran BOSS, got the load order right and everything seemed to be running fine.

As my character hit level 10 it starts to crash again - slowly at first but now that I'm at level 20 it is crashing every few minutes. I have no successfully been able to get a character past level 20 because of this.

I've done about 5 characters now... QUITE a few hours put into this and I'm at my wits end, I'm about to give up on this game.

After reading through a few posts here it seems everyone has an obscene amount of crashes but that can't be right - My game is virtually unplayable, massive immersion breaker when your whole computer locks up and you have to bring up task manager to close it.

Surely some of you are running a crazy amount of mods with no issues...

So do you think I should give up? Is there anything else I can do?
I did try TESedit on my old computer and that appeared to make things a bit smoother but a) didn't completely stop the crashes and b ) I had blue meshes appearing here and there as though I had delete the original mesh...

God I don't want to have to start ANOTHER character... this game is just becoming a massive waste of time and that svcks cause I love TES

Most people that have a huge mod list built up to it one mod at a time. All the way back to Oblivion I'm not aware of anyone that successfully installed dozens of mods at one time with no issues.

It should be noted that regardless of how good your rig is the game engine has limitations on how much it can process. It should also be noted that just saying "i have a crazy mod list" in no way helps anyone here determine what is going on in your system.

I was also having some serious freezing issues with the occasional CTD while playing, and they did seem to compound on themselves as I got higher in level. This was getting very frustrating for me and I started seriously trimming down on my mod list to try to fix it. This did not solve the problem and I really missed a lot of the mods I removed, too. So I was still freezing up (requiring a CTRL+ALT+DEL like you describe) and also forgoing mods I loved, which really put me off. But later it occurred to me that the trimming of my mod list made no difference, so likely my freezes were caused by something else. I have a very powerful computer and run a serious ENB setup with hugely modified Skirim INI files. On a whim, i went back and made conservative edits to my INIs (ugrids, mem, etc.) and restored some of my custom tweaks to default. It took many edits to my ini to get it right for my system, but once I did it virtually solved my freezing/crashing.

Having a powerful computer is sort of a double-edged sword with Skyrim. You can really make this game look absolutely beautiful and then you have a hard time bringing yourself to "downgrade". But some ini tweaks make such a relatively small visual difference but have a huge stability impact. So if you are finding that your freezes/crashes are occurring outdoors, particularly when changing cells, and you are confident that you do not have conflicting or excessive mods, try giving your INIs a serious look. I'd also suggest using a tool on the Nexus called 'Optimizer Textures' to put a cap on your textures to prevent overload on your VRAM. I cannot recommend that tool enough. It works great and it honestly had zero visual change in game for me.