I really like the game, but I'm getting very frustrated by frequent crashes for no apparent or consistent reason. I'm running Win7 on a core i7 3.33GHz box with 2 EVGA GTX 285's in SLI and a Creative X-Fi PCI-E sound card. I have the most recent sound and video drivers active. The patch for NV was installed through Steam and that is where I'm running the game from, also. Sometimes it will crash as soon as my last save has loaded, sometimes it will run for anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour before crashing. Sometimes I will get a Windows message saying the program has stopped working, other times it will crash to a white window and I can recover with Task Manager, other times it will crash to a black screen and I have to force a shutdown and reboot.

Can anyone offer me any suggestions as to what else might cause this kind of crash frequency and variety?

Thanks.

Try not running in SLI mode.

Try toning down your graphics settings - fiddle with your nVidia card settings in the settings manager section of your card's control panel. It won't stop them, but will lessen them.

Strip down any background programs in your task manager that aren't critical for the game or for your basic computer running.

Use fresh saves, save often.

One final thing: Verify your game cache on the FNV properties menu of Steam. That helps a lot.

This stopped all staggering and now if i crash it might be like once an hour.
(I am also running at over maxed ingame settings now if you want to do that you got to fiddle with fallout.InI wouldn't recommend it unless you know what your doing.)

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778

Click on the file tab to download it. I would also suggest you check out some other mods if you haven't\dont know about nexus.

I think it's the second patch that's making you crash to the desktop. Ever since I've patched with the second patch I have crashed a number of times.

There are so many possible issues with FNV that it's impossible for the end user to figure out WTF is causing the crashes. In my case once I start piling up a locker in my Novac room with a lot of weapons, every time I'm in that room for more than 15 minutes my game would crash. I would also get random crashes while wandering the wastes too and it's starting to happen more and more frequently. At this point I have given up on playing the game until it's probably patched. It's simply too frustrating to play at this point.