I wish people would stop blaming the game instead of the rig. Your pc may be more than capeable, that doesn't mean it won't crash. If you are crashing and others aren't, it's your rig.

These (along with some additional steps) just might help. It's very important to keep your operating system up to date. Video card drivers are otherwise the first thing to check, but honestly sometimes the most recent drivers are NOT the best (ATI anyone?). Try rolling back to a previous driver release for your card and see if that helps. If not, slap the latest back on. Unless you are using an SSD, make sure you defrag (I would recommend once a week, schedule it sometime in the early-early morning so it won't interfere with use). I've seen defrags work wonders on peoples' machines, depending on how severely it was needed. Another thing you might want to try is run an error check on your physical hard drive. If a drive's health is deteriorating it can lead to some very strange behavior.

Registry cleaners I would be a bit wary of. If you do run a registry cleaner such as CCleaner, make absolutely sure you create a registry backup so you can undo things if your comp decides to lose its mind.

Out of curiosity, what are your system specs? And are your hardware temps getting very high during play?

It's typically a combination of the PC and software. Unlike consoles, personal computers have about umpteen jillion different possible combinations of hardware, which makes writing hardware-intensive software a fairly large challenge. I wouldn't necessarily blame the rig or the software developer, because half the time software developers don't know what driver updates will break in the hardware compatibility of their programs, and hardware manufacturers don't have the ability to look at the code in every piece of software utilizing their hardware to predict how driver updates or whatever will affect the performance of all software.

This is why consoles typically have fewer crash issues (I said "fewer", not "no issues) compared to PCs. It's also why PC hardware that is 4 and 5 years old finds its way into new consoles.

I don't want to seem cold-blooded, but... welcome to Bethesda Softworks games.

Morrowind crashed.
Oblivion crashed.
Fallout 3 crashed.
Fallout: New Vegas crashed.
Skyrim crashes.
TES VI will crash.
Fallout 4 will crash.

They make these huge, expansive, incredible games... and sometimes they crash. I'm sure they hate it as much as we do, and they're doing everything they can to stop it, but it happens in every game. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with your computer, although taking steps to ensure that you're up to date with drivers and what have you is always a good idea.

Any game of theirs that has no bugs?

The reason why I always play the game on console for the first year or two! Until patches have arrived and there is plenty of mods to fix and improve the game, then PC.

Huh?

The PC version is (usually) fixable at least. Consoles are forced to wait for Bethesda/MS/Sony to do what they need to do before letting any patch go live. (Can take weeks to months.) The PC community is a smart bunch, and general having things figured out long before that normally......4GB Skyrim for example. (Just a carry over from other Gamebryo games.) No more PC crashing for me after using it. While the PS3 folks are having a hell of a time playing......while waiting on a patch.

This is why I always get the PC version. There is nothing new going on with Skyrim I haven't seen since I bought Morrowind years ago and every other game on the Gamebryo engine. (That's all the "Creation" engine is, a reworked Gamebryo engine.)

But I am not knocking your choice. I just find the reasoning behind kinda flawed. :shrug:

I wish people would stop blaming the game instead of the rig. Your pc may be more than capeable, that doesn't mean it won't crash. If you are crashing and others aren't, it's your rig.

This. The game is fine (for the most part), I have logged 25 hours with no crashing. Clean and optimize your rig. A patch won't fix your issues.

I
Don't crash
tis you
who is the
problem
yea, its you
that needs
to learn
to work
a computer