» Sun May 05, 2013 11:17 am I got Skyrim in January, I have played over 100 hours, but I have not finished any of the main quests yet, so I am really upset and desperately need help. The issue is, about two weeks ago my game started freezing at random times, but usually obnoxiously quickly (within 5 minutes of loading up my game). These are serious freezes, I cannot alt+tab out of them, ctrl+alt+del to get to the Task Manager to shut it down, nothing will respond except a long press on the power button. The freeze is accompanied by a freeze in the sound (one unending robot note), and colored lines across the screen.
Here's my current set up:
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.50 GHz (overclocked)
8 GB DDR2 RAM
Game and OS are on a Crucial 128 GB SSD
Windows 8 64-bit
2 x Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT in an SLI configuration
My first step when the problem started was checking the video card drivers. I updated them to the newest Beta 320.00 version (I have since tried clean installing an older stable 314.22 version). Didn't help. I tried Ultra graphics, I tried low graphics, and everything in between. I scoured the rest of my system for driver updates, but I keep my system very well tuned and clean, so that didn't solve anything. I ran tests to make sure my components are good (MemTest, all that, everything came back great). I reset everything to stock (un-overclocked). My system appears to be fine. I even played Star Wars: The Old Republic the other night for a few hours on Ultra graphics with no problems (save for some small framerate drops). So I think it must have to do with the game.
Now, I was running several mods, some graphical, some lore friendly content, but I have always been on top of my load orders with BOSS and kept them clean with TES5Edit. And considering I haven't added any mods for at least a month before this started happening, I don't think that was it. Regardless, I disabled them all and verified the integrity of my game cache. None of that worked. I have Dawnguard and Hearthfire, by the way, waiting for a sale to get Dragonborn. So I backed up my saves elsewhere in hopes I won't lose all my progress, then I deleted all of my local Skyrim files (after uninstalling and deleting the mods). I even re-installed Steam. I started completely fresh, nothing Skyrim related was left over. After re-installing, booting up the game completely stock, using the settings the game picked, I started up a new game, but got the same freeze. I have tried 3 or 4 times since as well and I cannot make it into Helgen in the wagon before the same freeze/crash happens.
Something is seriously wrong and I am completely lost. I never post to forums, but I haven't been able to find anyone who has had this exact same issue. I wish it was a simple crash to desktop. I have tried optimizing my SkyrimPrefs.ini, tried optimizing my application's graphical settings in the Nvidia control panel. I have tried running the game in windowed mode to see if an error pops underneath, it doesn't, just freezes hard all the same. I've run Task Manager along side it to monitor system performance and there are no spikes (normal-clocked CPU runs around 60-75%, RAM runs around 2.5 GBs used). I play with an Xbox controller and I've read that sometimes that can give problems, but even if it's unplugged, uninstalled, and I use mouse and keyboard it still happens.
Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions? I know I don't have the best equipment, but it was working fine for so long. I am more than willing to provide any more information or try any advice. Thanks for reading and trying!
