Windows XP Professional 32bit SP3
Pentium D 3Ghz 4M cache.
1 Gb RAM DDR 400Mhz
ATI Radeon HD 3450 512 Mb


Playing thru Steam. Skyrim 1.4 version.
The game goess well with low-mid settings.
Latest drivers n stuff. Also tried downgrading the ATI drivers as it seems some newer versions cause glitches on Skyrim.
Used ENB patch too.

I wish I could give links for the screenshots, but seems im not allowed.

I have a hairglitch.
The NPC's hair or mine gets displaced and starts hovering around the head.
Sometimes, when in third person, the glitched NPC hair gets magically on my char, overlapping my char's.

The offensive spells effects in first person gets distorted or changes its colour randomly.

The book meshes gets messed up when I try to read em.

The rest goes well. Its just those wich are very annoying.

Bump, please?

Well, I mention this quite frequently these days and may be you are aware of that fact: Skyrim isn't optimized for old systems. Your system is really outdated. If I'm correct Microsoft for example doesn't produce security updates for Win XP anymore, so you are inviting everyone to exploit your system, when not taking serious efforts to secure your system by other means. Your problems could stem from anything like: the game not being optimized, outdated drivers (are there current ones? in the sense of "not older than one month") or (very much possible) faulty hardware.

I would highly recommend to upgrade your system, if you got the time and money.

I'm sorry, but I'm unable to provide any further help or advice.

The drivers are the latests, Catalyst 12 released in january. Wich includes support for the HD 3450.
Faulty hardware, impossible. The card is new from the box, just 3-4 months and runs pretty well with other games without graphical glitches.

Seems Skyrim isn't optimized for any system, reviewing the countless ammount of bug reports on several forums. Even after the 1.4 patch.

Well, I dont have the money to get a better system for now, so thats not a viable option.

Id like to say a few things, but that would mean an instant perma-ban :/

Please keep in mind that updated drivers don't mean that they actually include all the Skyrim fixes for older cards, too.

If Skyrim is running well on your machine or not pretty much depends on your hardware. I had no serious problems with Skyrim so far, besides the ones they introduced through patches a while ago and even those haven't made it unplayable for me and a lot of other users. I don't think you can blame Bethesda for not optimizing their games for old hardware (and OS in your case). Oh and their games never had a good reputation engine wise, but with Skyrim it's less the question (with current hardware) IF Skyrim is running at all but HOW smooth it runs on your machine.

If you are lucky there'll be turning up a modder with just the bugfix mod you need, but if I were you I'd definatly try to save up some money to upgrade my machine.

Man thats cool,it runs on a pentium D with just 1 gb 400, Good on you! When you upgrade you'll know what you want.

I take it your running just vanilla? and chopped back xp to minimal ram usage? i don't know the specs for skyrim with xp but when i had my old athlon i could only use xp sp2, sp3 was no good.

All i can say is wipe the saves out,clean your registry,use ccleaner to wipe your "C" drives free space and back your saves up elsewhere other than c drive,use a ram booster to keep clawing that ram back for the game.Look around when people throw there old systems away on recycle days as thats the only way to get cheap ram for old machines.is that pentium running on a 300 wat psu?350? not that thats important but power draw can play havoc with your games.

Is the hard drive a sata 2? speed of your hardware makes a big difference in getting the game to the screen.Other than that let's hope theres another guy out there who's got the same problem.

Sorry sata 2 depends on your mobo's age,if it's i.d.e hard drive then that would frag the game really bad

azeraph, its vanilla.(Though I just gave up and started to mod it anyway)
I dont need to do any of those tricks to run it :/
I think if it were the wattage, it would go crazy with the whole PC. I have a psu of 500 watts.
The game is actually playable, with a decent performance.
Oh, I know, some people just throw it away for the sake of it. I got this CPU for 15€ :/

Its just that i'm playing and doing stuff and then, "BAM!" that guy's hair flew away or the book im about to read gets messed up, or Im going to toast a bandit and the fire on my hands turns black (wich is cool actually, black fire... should be a mod ) or blue or gets distorted.
Or find a corpse with its hair hovering above it XD

I haven't gone far yet to see if theres any bug breaking the gameplay.

Dykes, I think Im gonna go mess with the CK and see if I can do something about it. Because the hair gettign messed up happens with specific hairstyles.
(I'll also try to do the neat black fire spell )

Sweet man.

not knowing your full specs had to make guesses.

are you running a hair mod? Wow that 1 gb allows mods.If it was psu,you would get hiccups then bsods,crashes,freezups but a 500 is more than enough.

Let's hope one of the more experienced guys here can see why the hair is'nt locking to the skeleton

Nope, vanilla hair.
Yes, it allows mods, is that weird? I only go for gameplay mods and those which adds new equipment.
And I hope so. Its simply too weird :/

After removing all saves, and starting a new game, Ive been playing for a while and it seems the frecuency of these glitches are beggining to lower.

I still dont know what causes them, but so far, the glitched magic effect seems to be gone for good. As well as the book one.
The only one that persist is the hair glitch.