I just bought fallout goty edition on steam for windows 7. Every 2-10 minutes it freezes and the game completely stops responding. It started very early in the game when I was still in vault 101, and has persisted all the way to the DC ruins. It has been very frustrating.
Ive got a laptop with 6GB of ram, an 2.2 Ghz i7-2720QM processor, and an nvidia geforce gt 540m graphics card.
There aren't any other problems. I have tried lowering the graphics settings, verifying the game cache and updating the game, but it still crashes.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You have a CPU with more then 4 threads. Try the quadcore fix.

Open up the .ini file located in My Documents>My Games>Fallout 3. *Do not alter the one in the actual game directory labeled Fallout_Default_ini*
In the FALLOUT.ini find the line

bUseThreadedAI=0
change the 0 to a 1

then below it add the line

iNumHWThreads=2

Well, I don't know if it's only me, but I can't find any "fallout.ini", only "fallout_default.ini"... Any ideas? >.<

EDIT: Bought it by Steam, BTW.