Greetings. Hoping to call upon your expertise to figure out how to fix a problem with the in-game graphics.

Examples:

• In certain quests you are required to align certain beams of light - I cannot see these lights.
  
• There is a place where there are geysers (hot springs?) - I can hear the water but cannot see the springs.
  
• I cannot see spider webs that block paths.

Sorry if this has been asked a gazillion times - I have had a look through a few pages but cannot find an answer. I'm clearly a plebeian when it comes to hardware matters, so I would appreciate some clear advice (in layman terms if at all possible)

Using a program called CPU-Z, this is my PC info:

CPU

Packard Bell BV
Processor: Intel Pentium D 925
Specification: Intel® Pentium® D CPU 3.00 GHz

MEMORY

DDR2
Channels #: Single
Size: 3072 MBytes

GRAPHICS

NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
Code Name: G73
Revision: A2
Technology: 90 nm

Clocks
Core: 560 MHz
Memory: 700 MHz

Memory
Size: 256 MBytes
Type: DDR
Bus Width: 128 bits

It could be because you are running so under spec that some effects are not rendering or some bug.

Wow, Packard Bell...that brings back some memories, I'm actually surprised that that old chestnut can even load the game! Your best hope is run everything on the lowest possible settings but you will miss out on all the bells and whistles because your CPU and GPU can't support much of what the game offers.

The CPU was obsolete practically from the first one of that series that Intel tried selling, which wasn't nearly as good as a Pentium III running slower. AMD's K7s and K8s made them look silly, those were so much better.

That GPU is less obsolete, but is still extremely weak because it is so old (over six years now), The real requirements are

Corrected Skyrim Minimum Requirements

* Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
* Processor: Dual Core 2.3 GHz C2D or equivalent CPU
* 3GB System RAM
* 6GB free HDD Space
* Direct X 9 compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM (and
sufficient performance to actually put that VRAM to use)
* DirectX compatible sound card
* Internet access for Steam activation

Computer is too old, sorry.

Two ancient dinosaurs together, but the K8 is by far the better of the two:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1333476-pc-error-when-trying-to-run-skyrim/

Wow, thanks so much for all the responses. I knew my PC wasn't amazing (particularly when it takes 10 mins to download 200k of emails and everything else locks up and it drives me bat-guano ...) ... but I sincerely didn't think it was that much of a crapstation.

My better half bought it for me a few years ago in France, just so I could play Oblivion ...

I have had the usual quest glitches that everyone else has had, and lag hell which has improved dramatically since the latest update, but other than not seeing the awesome graphics, I have not had any other issues while playing. Everything pretty much runs smoothly ... go figure!

Anyway, thanks again for the detailed responses - I appreciate the time you've taken to answer this. I'll just have deal with the lack of visual glory