Hi guys, new poster here desperately looking for some help. I have been sifting through forums for a while now and have not been able to find any helpful or solid information. It does seem as if many Skyrim users are experiencing similar problems with the game crashing to desktop or their system entirely on a regular basis. I personally am experiencing a crash of my entire system as if the power is being cut off every 10 minutes or so after booting the game up. My computer will then, strangely enough, restart itself.

I am certainly not very knowledgeable when it comes to PCs but I can tell you that I installed the game fine at launch - clocking up to about 300 hours of play before a patch (I believe some time around March?) caused some issues with the in-game lighting and shadows would flicker like crazy, along with some rather strange shapes in the sky. This was initially what caused me to stop playing because I could not seem to fix it, even after removing all mods.

This week though (a year after launch) I thought I would give it another shot. I completely removed Skyrim from my system (all traces) and reinstalled after upgrading my graphics card drivers. This fixed the lighting problems (huzzah!), however, shortly afterwards my PC shutdown.

It has continued to do this every time I try to play Skyrim for more than 7-10 minutes. I have tried various things such as editing some values in the .ini file (which were suggested on some other forum), installing slightly older drivers for my card, re-installing, etc. (nothing overly complex I know; I really don't know what else is safe to screw around with which is why I thought I had better ask).

My PC specs (the same ones I have previously played over 300 hours of Skyrim with, with absolutely NO problems):

Dell Inspiron 545
Intel core Quad CPU, Q8300 @ 2.50 GHz
4GB RAM
Windows 7 64bit

My Video Card specs (same card too, no changes asides from upgrading the drivers):

NVidia GeForce GT 220
Driver version: 306.97
DirectX 10.1 support
Graphics clock: 615 MHz
Processor clock: 1335 MHz
Dedicated Video Memory: 1024 MB


If anyone has any sort of advice or solution that would be amazing. I hope this is ok to post here, thankyou for your time.

If your whole computer is crashing that certainly sounds like a hardware issue. Could it be your CPU or GPU is overheating? When I Googled "skyrim frame rate limiter" I found a file that I placed in the Skyrim directory to cap the FPS to 50. (or whatever value you like) Prior to that, the game was running at some ridiculously high FPS and causing the CPU to run hot. Capping the FPS fixed that. (although I still have issues with Skyrim crashing that appear be unrelated to my hardware)

That was my first guess too, Talby, considering my PC certainly isn't amazing.

What confused me though is that this never happened while playing the game for long periods (5+ hours) and yet happens EVERY TIME after 10 minutes of play now. The tower certainly doesn't feel overly hot.

I will perhaps try a FPS limiter though if you think that could help, any recommended?

This is what I use: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/34

It also got rid of an annoying bug that caused random splashing/water sounds when moving around.

Another thing to try if you haven't already is, maybe go to a very low-detail area with all the graphics settings at the lowest and see if it takes longer to crash. If it does take longer, it might indicate that your CPU/GPU is having a hard time keeping up. If not, it might be a software issue with Skyrim itself. (Talos knows there's enough of them!)