I've been running Skyrim on my main PC since last summer. I have about 90 mods installed, both through Steam and through NexusMods. The game runs flawlessly on my big desktop PC. Now, here's the onion.

I have a good laptop I use for travelling (I travel for a living) that is well past the specs to run Skyrim. I installed Skyrim via Steam and all my mods through Nexus, matching exactly what was on my desktop, and it ran (also) flawlessly for some time.

Until now. I haven't installed any new mods on either machine, but now every time I try to use my laptop to load a game, Skyrim shows the loading screen and then crashes to desktop. My desktop is still running Skyrim normally. Again, nothing has changd on either machine (except saving games) since I last used the laptop. I tried uninstalling Skyrim, reinstallingvia Steam, reinstalling all my Nexus mods, syncing up and restarting - same problem, I get a loading screen and crash to desktop. I am running SKSE and SkyUI among other mods.

My question: What's the best way to clone the obviously functional install on my desktop over to my laptop? Barring that, how can I diagnose why the laptop is crashing every time I try to load the game?

Any advice would be appreciated. Skyrim makes boring nights in a hotel room much more tolerable.

Before you go tearing into things, do older saves have this issue? It could just be a save that is corrupted enough to not load on the other game. Perhaps you have a few stray meshes or textures from other mods laying around in your data files on the PC that are just now causing problems on the laptop. If older saves are not good, then copy your entire data files directory from the PC to the laptop (rename the one on the laptop first just in case you need to undo this).

I thought of that - I have multiple saves of the four different characters, and none of them will load. At least one of those saves is at least two weeks older than the last time I used the laptop, and worked on the laptop then. Also (and I should have mentioned this earlier, sorry) I tried starting a new game, and the game hangs on the loading screen and goes nowhere. I entered the console while the new game was hung up, put in "coc riverwood" and a generic Nord character appeared in Riverwood, I could run around and save the game, however I could not reload the game or any other game while playing.

If I copy the entire data folder over from my desktop, should that address this? I carefully went line by line down my Nexus mods just as a precaution, exactly the same ones installed and enabled/disabled on each machine, and of course the Steam mods self-verify on loading.

You could enable the papyrus log file, to see what mod maybe cause the CTD !!!