Hi,

I've been having problems with my game freezing and CTD every since i purchased skyrim.

I believe I have found the cause of my ignorance. And if you have two harddrives, where Steam/Skryim is on the second,

i.e. your main drive is an SSD (C:/) and you keep all your stuff on your spin drive (E:/)

Follow these steps and report back 4 SCIENCE if you have better results.

Start Menu > Performance Information and Tools

Click on Adjust Visual Effects

click on Advanced Tab > Under the Virtual Memory heading click on Change button

You should notice that your C: or main drive has "System Managed" next to it.

on mine, the E:/ did not have system managed but rather "none"

Let's change that. Highlight the drive where skyrim is and untick the top box where it says Automatically manage paging...

Then click the System Managed Size radial button and click the SET button once you do so.

Apply it and it should ask for you to restart. Please do, play and report back.

Edit: Not only did the crashing massively reduce, but my game will sometimes get out of freezing state. But most importantly my load times have been cut in half, at least. it was taking forever for skyrim to even start. so even if it doesn't fix your crashing, it still speeds up everything

What kind of drive is your Skyrim on? Is it on a magnetic platter (a data drive), with your other drive being an SSD boot drive?

The only possible reason I can think of that moving your page file to your Skyrim/data drive may help you is that your data drive is spinning down to save power and wear-and-tear when it's unused for a long time. Sticking your paging file on it might keep it spinning, so avoiding delays while the drive spins up when Skyrim wants to load in some data. However, you may well just have put a sticking-plaster on an underlying problem, and in the process slowed down your whole system (if the pagefile is used heavily on your machine) and reduced the life of your data drive.

Probably best to do some more in-depth learning and investigation on your own system before you ask other people to randomly re-configure theirs; they might do something stupid if they don't understand what you're asking them to do .

[edit]

Incidentally, I do have my pagefile on my data drive, but that was a deliberate and informed decision, and there's nothing on my data drive I don't have backed up. And I have Skyrim on my SSD boot drive (also backed up) so that it accesses its data as fast as possible.

My E:/ was endlessly crunching when i booted into windows.

it had default 512 mbs of memory being used for it, afaik i just expanded it.

I would like to hear if you think it could cause a problem in the long run, obviously I'll take the thread down and change the settings.

but for right now everything is running 100x smoother for me

edit: I have so that both drives are "System Managed" btw

It's not so much that I think it could cause problems (beyond the usual wear-and-tear that all machines are prone to), more that messing around with default system configurations is something that I feel people should only do when they understand what's going on under the bonnet and what the benefits and disadvantages may be on their particular system. It's very much a case of 'your milage may vary' - and so may anybody else's.

It's great that this has helped you, and you may very well have found that Skyrim has issues with crashing if it can't load data fast enough - but other people with differently configured systems or different makes of drive might (for example) be better off adjusting their power management settings in Windows, or moving Skyrim to their SSD boot drive if they have the space.

It's a bit like .ini tweaks. One man's brilliant tweak may be another man's waste of time and a third man's crash-fest.

But it is interesting, and it does make me wonder if Skyrim has some poor time-out handling in some of its data-loading code.

well i kept looking at why my harddrive was so slow to index or load up a program,

with skyrim i broke it down to CPU, Memory, Sound.

I changed my sound driver from anolog to digital, even though it isn't digital and that seemed to have a positive effect.

The next thing I looked into was the above.

The last thing I was wondering is, like in Fo3, you had to reduce how many cores you used, in some instances. I was wondering, especially after looking at that data from the other thread, if maybe a cpu could be too fast, or use too many cores.

I was going to reduce them in msconfig, but i had alot of success with the above. If it's not potentially damaging, maybe some people could at least try it and tell us if their computer blows up

I have Skyrim on a second drive and have Virtual memory disabled. But then again I only run apps from SSDs.

Also, it's not really "messing around with the system" to disable Virtual memory if you are running an SSD. It is highly recommended. But only for SSDs. Samsung Magician (and probably other proprietary apps that come with new drives) will do this for you automatically.