Hey

I know there are a lot of topics to help with this but when you've got my very basic knowledge of PC's most of it is in one ear and out the other, so I was just hoping you guys could give me some specific advice. I'm not really sure what to post so if you need any info just ask and I'll give the info you need...I'm just not sure what's relevent.

Basically last night I was playing Skyrim and I got a BSOD after a couple of hours, I tried again and same thing. I looked it up and found a suggestion that it was due to overheating, and sure enough my laptop was almost too hot to touch on the underside. I put it down somewhere cool and tried again this morning, same thing except it was a CTD and a notification down the bottom that said something along the lines of:

Your display driver has stopped responding and has recovered.

After disabling all mods, setting graphics to low, verifying game cache integrity, and running in wondowed mode, it's still the same thing. Either a BSOD or CTD. Wierdly Morrowind works fine with 0 problems, but Amnesia:Dark Descent and Portal crash just after getting to the main menu.

After my reading I'm worried something has overheated and busted in my comp.

Also of note is I heard that audio can cause these problems, and I've had some very unstable audio when it comes to Skyrim. I'd notice when playing, especially when using headphones, that I'd get some audio tear and when I start the Bethesda drum roll thing doesn't play properly.

So I suppose I'd just like a few suggestions as to some things to try. I'll probably take it to a computer repair shop but I was just hoping for an easy fix.

Thanks for any help and I apologise for my dopey computer skills in advance. If you need info about my problem/PC/whatever just ask and I'll spill the beans

hmmm, sounds like an issue i had. Alot of games (especially the graphically intensive ones) would cause my computer to either hard lock, CTD or straight out give a bsod.
All of this turned out to be a display driver failure and the bsod always had an atikmdag.sys (something along those lines at least) error message.

it turned out to be my motherboard :\

It's a bit harder to test on a laptop though since you can't really swap out hardware to find the culprit. The only thing i can think of is that you should download gpu-z and make it log while you're playing a game. Scroll through the log (after you crash) and see if you can find any strange values (specifially temperatures).

Perhaps also get speedfan, put down the values here (temps, voltages). That's all i can think of really.

@op;

Dont worry to much, it sounds like a simple graphics driver problem. Your best bet is to simply reinstall the graphics drivers with the latest version for your card. If you use an ATI/AMD card simply do a standard install as you would any other time. If you use an Nvidia card, ensure you select the option for a "clean driver install" or similarly named option. This is to ensure old files are removed (amd does it as standard).

As an FYI for others reading the thread; if you get a BSOD and it metions either atikmdag.sys or nv4_dsp it means that its a graphics driver problem.

Okay, it looks like it might be a virus of some description. I tried to download an Nvidia driver update only for the download to get stuck at 99% and 1 second left. I tried to run a couple of malware programs and they crashed and refused to start up. When I download anything it gets to 99% and 1 second and then won't work. Pretty much anything with an exe. won't start. Pain in the ass but I can handle virus problems. Thanks for the help guys, if when I get rid of this Skyrim still won't work I'll try your suggestions.

Thanks.