Hi all i'm new here but basically looking for some help.
Im playing oblivion on my laptop with windows 7 and shes been fine for months now but as of yesterday as soon as i load a saved game, the game stops, a small black box appears at the top left of the screen at the same time as a 'not responding' dialogue box appears on the desktop. At this point i lose mouse cursor and can only use ctrl-alt-delete to access it again.

1. Why is this happening NOW after such a long period of enjoyable gaming?

2. How do i sort it out?

I apologise for the layman's terminology but im not the most expert of gamers, any help at all would be deeply appreciated!

Your symptom is almost exclusively tied to very low quality video devices sold by Intel as "graphics" instead of decent parts from proper graphics companies.

My best guess is you have some such video, but were willing to accept poor graphics and herky-jerky animation long enough that the repeated stress and overheat finally became cumulative enough to damage the chipset (TTBOMK, no one else's chipset video ever showed this particular failure type behavior),