So, i recently started playing New Vegas, though it seems to be unstable for some reason. For no apparent reason, and unpredictably, it will crash and become un-responsive while this is annoying and would love it, if it didn't happen. It can be solved by ending the process and starting the game again.

This isn't the biggest problem, for some reason it also caused the audio to bug and crash at the same time. The way i can describe this is it causes the last noise playing, to be repeated, infinitly and the only way to stop it is to restart my entire PC.

Any help is greatly welcomed!

My PC has the following specs:

- Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.111118-2330)
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
- Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. P67A-UD3P-B3
- Memory: 4096MB RAM
- Card name: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
- Audio Device: ASUS Xonar DG Audio Device
- Keyboard: Logitech G15
- Mouse: Mionix Saiph 3200

That's a common problem with this game.

Consider doing a HD cleanup and full defrag, it makes a big positive impact on how this game runs. My computer is a bit less well spec'd than yours so I have these same issues after I've been playing the game awhile. I re-run clean and defrag on my HD and it improves.

There is also a mod I tried that I had good results with, smoothing the gameplay out after I got Dead Money. (Dead Money just seemed to slow everything down. And when the game starts to slow down, sort of like a stop frame picture show, then it usually locks up just as you describe and I have to use CTRL-ALT-DEL and shut it down with task manager. ) Anyhow, the mod is called New Vegas Stutter Remover and it requires NVSE. It works really well for me. The game runs smoother and does not crash nearly as much as it used to. You can get that mod at Nexus if you want to try it.

Only downside of that mod is the installation was a manual affair so you need to pay careful attention to the instructions and make sure you have NVSE installed also. The Stutter Remover is not a simple mod plugin, rather it goes into the NVSE folder.

Thanks, thing is, i dont remember this it being this buggy and crashy when i first played it.

Imho it wasn't. I really noticed a change for the worse when I upgraded from just NV to Ultimate Edition, it caused a lot of lag (stutter) and crash problems. There was a thread about Dead Money being a possible cause, so I disabled all the expansions for awhile and it definitely improved.

However, since I got that Stutter remover going I have been able to run NV Ultimate with all the extra content enabled and things have been more or less stable.

BUT lol I just finished Old World Blues and during the latter half of that DLC my game would crash about every second time I fast traveled, and often when I was just trying to go on foot from place to place to discover new map markers. Doing a HD clean and defrag didn't help me there. Save/reload/save/reload. Yuck.

It may be that my OWB problems were due to playing the game while Steam was online so I could get the challenges done. Sometimes when offline it doesn't recognize them if the game glitches. Happened to me a bunch of times I'd have to redo part of some quest. So I played OWB with Steam online, but my gut feeling is when the home internet is flakey then NV has this tendency to crash more often. It's just a gut feeling I have cause I played the game a lot both on and offline and I feel its way more stable when Steam is offline.

Anyways, good luck hope it works out for you.

Haven't done Dead Money yet, Honest Hearts seemed fine, main game was ok too, the odd crash but nothing much. Then i did OWB and like you it seemed to crash every 30mins, and in Lonesome Road it has done it 2-3 times!

Post a dxdiag: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1122570-how-to-dxdiag/
Put it between spoiler tags

Do you use any mods?

You mention weird audio behavior. Try updating/reinstalling the latest audio drivers.