My Skyrim has been crashing to the desktop regularly, enough that I had to do manual saves all the time, because I never knew when I was going to lose all my progress.
I tried a lot of the posted suggestions, including changing the audio settings, but nothing worked.

FINALLY, I found my problem. Realtek audio apparently works fine with the microsoft provided drivers, except for Skyrim!
I went to http://www.realtek.com/downloads/downloadsCheck.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=14&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=falseand downloaded their driver, and the problem immediately disappeared...I havent had 1 single crash since I replaced the driver. WOHOOO


Hopefully this will help a lot of other folks with realtek hardware.

Thanks for providing a link! Not alot of people know about updating drivers for sound can help. It has helped me (I downloaded the latest said driver about a month ago), and I suggest others to do the same. It may help, it may not but it shouldn't hurt right?

I always install the drivers straight off the CD and then update if needed, from my motherboard manufacturers site, in this case ASUS. Never use Microsoft drivers!

One of the many things I've tried to no avail.

I really dont understand it worked fine on windows vista wich i had installed yesterday, today on the other hand on win 7 it keeps crashing i cant install any texture related mods and the game crashes even tho i install them exactly like i did on vista. Weird thing is its exactly the same pc just different operating systems

please.. don't do this.....


Again... don't do this unless the REFERRENCE driver is not available from the actually manufacturer of whatever device it is.

Example.... Asus may have made your motherboard.. or your video card..... BUT the components that make up that motherboard or video card are made by someone else.

Take a Asus P8H67-M Evo Motherboard...

The drivers on the disc are basically BETA/old as dirt in the computer "years" essentially.

Worse yet is that the "new" drivers from asus's download center are usually as old or rarely if ever UPDATED.... mostly the only good thing asus's download center is for is bios updates and perhaps network adapter drivers or Specialized sata/usb controller drives where the real manufacturers don't provide drivers for.

The P8H67-M Evo uses the H67 intel chipset... It also has an ICH10R chipset controller too.

The nice thing about Intel is that they have an all in one update utility that is kept up to date and available directly from intel. It's designed to cover almost ANY intel chipset produce in the last nearly 7 years, they only release specialized seperate packages such as the recent x79 chipset release.. but as of a while ago, they have those drivers now packaged in with the inf tool....

INTEL INF UPDATE UTILITY
http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/highlights/chpsts/inf

Intel also provides the specialized ACHI/RAID Drivers for the SATA controller (ICH10R in this motherboards case).. but also applies to all ichx/ichxr i think down to the 7 series which is quite old....
http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/highlights/chpsts/imsm

You should always install the inf update utility.... reboot, then install the rapid storage driver followed by a reboot (potentially 2 if required) so that the latest ACHI/RAID driver is used rather than the intel supplied generic one from the inf update package (which is still way better than microsoft supplied)

Go to via's or realteks website for the latest Audio drivers.. always....

Video cards.... i don't think i have to explain anything here.... go to ati or intel or nvidia's website and get the latest..... Specially for those running intels i3/i5/i7 iGPU HD1000/2000/3000 graphics

Oh and if your using a modern computer ... say produced in the last say 5 years.... you should be running in ACHI or RAID Mode NOT IDE... otherwise your sevearly crippling your hardrive speed.


For the most part.. yup...