I can't even get through the opening scene. I have a relatively new Asus with tons of processing power, memory and a good graphics card.

After doing a Google search I have found tons of other people with the same problem, and other people trying to tell them it's a hardware problem (or overheating). This happens even when I first turn on my computer and it's still very cool. I just bought the game tonight, and if I can't find a solution I'm going to take it back tomorrow and perhaps give a different game a try. None of my searches have come up with a solution. Is there a patch addressing this? Thanks for any input.

When you say shutting off, is it just black screening and then your monitor going into standby mode and you have to hard reset your pc to get it booted again?

It (appears) to me to be shutting off, but I suppose it's possible that's happening and I just think it is. Let me try to play again and see.

your PSU being over drawn maybe your issue, overclocking could be your issue, overheating could be your issue, incompatibility between your components could be a issue

if you svck with computers take it to a computer shop and tell them you wont take no [censored] and you'll pay them [censored] all for their service's

Need more info for anything useful to come out of it...
Specs of computer? "new Asus" isn't enough to go on.
stock or overclocked?
Version of game? DVD, Steam, Pirated? patched?
Any mods? 4GB patch?
Drivers?

Try this if it's black screening of death on you - http://enbdev.com/download_en.htm

It's shutting completely off, and if you Google "Skyrim shutting computer off" you'll see it's a common problem. I'm going to see if I can figure out my computer specs right now.

Windows 7 Home Premium

Model: ASUS Notebook G73Jh Series
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 CPU Q 740 @ 1.73HGz 1.73 GHz
Intalled Memory (RAM): 6.00 GB
System Type: 64-bit Operating System

(Video Card I think)
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870

my dell laptop uses the same processor, it's a POS for gaming tbh, you'd need to disable all the power limiting, downclocking ect, then it'll still be a POS, upgrade your CPU your mobo will take a gen 2 cpu

It shouldn't really be possible for a userspace application to directly tell the hardware to power down, or do anything, really. That would imply a major flaw in the operating system, the hardware design or the drivers. Also, try googling "XX shuts down computer", replacing XX with the name of any popular game. There will be plenty of discussions, most populated by people playing on some trash tier prebuilt desktop or poorly engineered laptops, many struggling to even report specs.

You did manage to find specs though, so you're one step ahead of them at least

Can you try to monitor temperatures while playing? Could be just a badly attached heatsink somewhere. The laptop might have some monitoring software of its own, or something like http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html could work.

I played the crap out of Dragon Age Origins without any problems. This thing is shutting off after literally about a minute, even when I turn on the laptop fresh when it's cold.

Something is triggering overheating. The complete shutoff is your laptop trying to prevent heat damage to your mobo and other components.

After trying to clean the inside, maybe with compressed air, try setting your windows power setting to balanced if it isn't already, and go into advanced power options and set CPU power to something less than 100%, maybe 90.

Someone mentioned a possible fix using Radeon Pro -- make / select Skyrim's profile and make sure "Flip Queue Size" to set to 0. If the Skyrim profile doesn't exist, make one. This has fixed someone else's overheating problem with their laptop.