CTD on esc, even with no mods

[Jackaline]

Hello, this is my first time posting to the forums - just gotten to the point where trying to fix this by myself is taking up way too much of my time.

 

The issue I've been having is that Skyrim CTD's (no error message or anything) from pretty much anything requiring my computer to think, I guess. Pressing esc, pressing tab, pressing E, jumping down a hill too fast, that sort of thing. I've just found out this happens without any mods as well.

I've been having more and more (different) problems with Skyrim for the past few months, mostly because I'd been stupidly adding and taking away mods willy nilly from my character.

 

I ended up doing a factory reset on my computer, and upon reinstalling my pirated copy of Skyrim I found it wouldn't load up at all. I figured it was probably a sign to buy it on Steam and start a new character but I'm kind of devastated to find it's only gotten worse since doing that the other week.

 

Since then I've been doing all sorts of stuff trying to figure out what's wrong with it (with new test characters each time):

disabling mods, updating mods, getting patches, combining texture packs, optimizing said texture packs, reinstalling scripted mods, adding ENBoost, removing ENBoost, removing SKSE... Nothing has made any difference whatsoever. Even when I stripped it down to absolute vanilla without even the DLC's and started over, it CTD'd when I tried to loot the Stormcloak's body in the intro sequence.

Another fun new issue I found just now was that I was unable to load up a save I had just made after briefly quitting to turn one of the graphics settings down - just some nice endless loading-screen stuff going on.

 

Not really sure how to make sense of my computer specs to be honest, but here's some of the things I see people mention:

http://i.imgur.com/ZZ4UXFI.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/8Lgdi6L.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/2iVPD54.png

 

I use a laptop with Windows 7 Pro on it, which probably isn't ideal but I've got to emphasise I've been playing this game for at least a year and it's been doing really well. I always have the settings on pretty low, but that's fine and the only issues I've had with crashing have been from load ordering problems when I was still figuring that stuff out.

The game is located in C:\program files(x86)\steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim, it's presumably the latest version since I bought it from Steam only recently,

I also use Mod Organizer 1.3.7.

 

Right now, it's totally unmodded without SKSE but I'd usually have over 200 mods activated. I don't know if that's stupid or not, I've been doing my best to narrow them down but I do have standards. No offense to Bethesda. But I can honestly tell you this was working out fine for me before I entered CTD hell. I use TES5Edit and LOOT and all that.

Since there are no mods activated right now I'm pretty sure this isn't a load order issue, so I won't post a LOOT log unless someone asks about some specific setup I had.

 

Sorry if this is a bit long-winded, thank you for checking it out - totally don't know what to do anymore and it'd be awesome if someone could help fix this.

I just wanna play Skyrim again, I don't even care if I have to play vanilla at this point... Was a real decent game despite how much I complain about it. Maybe it heard me :sad:

Edited July 1, 2015 by Jackaline

[Vudou]

upon reinstalling my pirated copy of Skyrim

^^ :nuke:

 

I believe that's your problem right there. Most mod will not work with pirated copies and Nexus doesn't condone those with pirated copies.

Edited July 1, 2015 by Baibaihe

[Jackaline]

Yes, then I bought the game and this is still happening. My current copy isn't pirated. These problems only started when I bought it. Hence why I'm not stoked.

[Jackaline]

Sorry to double-post I don't know the etiquette with that here but seriously... My game is now fully legitimate and it only got worse.

I'm not so stupid that I'd put this much effort into a post about a pirated game. I payed for this with my money and it will not go, when in the past it has. It's very frustrating.

[dragonslayer2k12]

Laptops are a terrible thing to game on except those super duper space heater models that are really heavy and have two video cards in them. Anything less than $1200 laptop is not worth gaming on. Depending on the brand of laptop you have, you could be looking at bad parts or some software bug.

 

Some basic things to think about first, do you have the laptop sitting on a carpet or table cloth or some other cloth or bed cover? doing that will smother the laptop it needs air to cool off the processor and most laptops take in their air at the bottom then exhaust it out at the side so smothering a laptop will cause it to heat up and crash all the time. Best to play on a clean table or desk no cloths nearby. Now if you want to lay down on a bed with it there are some laptop trays with comfy stuffs under them for that sort of thing some even have built in cooling fans that sit under the laptop to help it cool off too.

 

Your laptop cooling fan may be loaded down with dust and crap so you might need to clean it out with a can of compressed air which you can find at your nearby big box store or one of the few remaining retailers of computer related stuff nearby. Clean that fan out, there may be video card fans to clean out too which don't use the same heatsinks as the processor so you might have to clean those too.

 

Depending on how old your computer is you may have some hardware just wearing out like memory or hard drive. If you don't hear funny noises coming from the hard drive while it runs like a loud clicking or repetitive clicking then it could just be the memory. You could try taking your memory chips out then putting them back in so they are properly seated/installed. Laptops hate it when you drop them or bump them at all because important things like memory and hard drive can be permenantly messed up kinda like brain damage for laptops.

 

What brand is your laptop?

 

HP laptops are notorious for having cheaply made motherboards that go bad in less than a year or get a corrupted bios problem that never goes away. When you start your laptop if the light on the caps lock key blinks twice over and over again before finally the computer starts then the bios is corrupt and can't be fixed.

 

Toshiba was pretty good up until this year when they started piumping out el cheapo made junk that has screws holding the battery in and no bios battery and really flimsy easy break plastic.

 

Dell is getting better since they went private you should not have too many problems from dell these days.

 

Lenovo makes cheap hinges then refuses to sell replacements to their 3rd party distributors so any replacements you find on ebay or elsewhere are even cheaper knockoffs that cost $70 or more for just one hinge. Never buy lenovo until the chinese learn their lesson about those hinges.

 

Acer/gateway/emachines all the same company now, they merged years ago and the quality is not that bad better than hp sometimes.

 

 

If skyrim is crashing doing crazy things even after a fresh install of windows and skyrim then something else is wrong. You may have a hidden virus on your computer called a boot sector virus or rootkit which loads itself back onto your pc after you restore it. This kind of virus hides in the boot sector of your hard drive so it survives any reloads and restores. You really can't clean it out until you get your hard drive connected to another computer and cleaned from there like with a usb hard drive reader for example.

 

There is nothing wrong with windows 7 pro or business or home or whatever it works just fine and doesn't have a bunch of buggy crap running on it like win8 does. Windows 7 is just fine for gaming don't worry about changing it just use it.

 

If you can't do any of the above mentioned things yourself you could take your laptop to a repair place and let them look at it. If you live in the states don't go to best/worst buy or office depot they don't know what they are doing and don't care either they just want your money.

[Jackaline]

Thanks for the reply!

 

Yeah, it's a Sony Vaio laptop that I've had for at least 3-4 years now - I've actually set up my desk so both the sides and bottom get air through them but I haven't cleaned the fans before. I might have a go at that.

I did have some kind of virus on my computer before I reinstalled Windows that was making explorer.exe crash and all this nasty stuff - I've been borderline obsessively running Malwarebytes since that, but it is starting to get a bit weird again. Man, I really hope I don't have to fish around with that again...

 

Good to know it's probably not Skyrim itself, doesn't surprise me to hear it's probably my laptop although it's still kinda sad. I'll check out the fan and do some more research on those virus types and get back to you if anything changes. Thanks again, dude

Edited July 4, 2015 by Jackaline

[dragonslayer2k12]

Yeah that virus won't go away without the help of a second computer running a good av to clean off your hard drive with a usb drive reader. Viruses load into system memory so they can copy themselves back onto the system after you remove them with something like malware bytes. If you can't get to a second clean computer you might be able to get your foot in the door so to speak with something called combofix from bleeping computer website. You have to uninstall any antivirus you have before you run combofix though because it can't work with an av in the way. Once it is done it gives a full report in a text file of what it did. It would be a lot better if you could scan your drive with another computer though it would be a for sure it is clean now thing ya know?

 

 

Sony is notorious for having crappy driver updates and trying to be "special" with their implementation of reference hardware like video cards and sound chips so don't be surprised if the latest driver from amd site doesn't work right on your laptop. Sony is just a really over priced version of hp really, they have similar problems with motherboards going bad early sometimes. If you can find them still sold somewhere panasonic is good since they are still actually made in japan or the older toshiba qosmio line of super duper expensive laptops with the big fat power plug! those run great but the battery lasts about 30 mins due to the processor actually being fast enoung to do something so expect to keep it plugged in all the time.

[Deleted5770650User]

If you don't have access to a second computer a live antivirus CD may help.

[Jackaline]

Small update: Still haven't gotten around to cleaning the fan, but I did try updating stuff like DirectX and the other things included in the Skyrim folder. This sounds pretty basic but I just kind of assumed they'd be installed with Skyrim. Anyway, this hasn't changed anything with the modded game but the vanilla game runs (and looks, oddly enough) excellent now.

 

I can save, tab, do things fast, jump down hills, the lot - no CTD, not even any lag. I'm super impressed. It's almost like installing basic game components makes the games work better. I should mention, this is when launching it from Steam's desktop shortcut for it instead of launching it from Mod Organizer (I have a vanilla profile on it to keep things in one place)

 

I don't want to jinx it but it's actually running smoother than I've ever had before, and I can't tell if I'm only just noticing it now or if the high res packs didn't work before but that's looking really good too. I seriously don't understand the correlation between Mod Organizer and Steam especially not now, but I am seriously wondering if I just... Sneak the texture packs into the Skyrim data folder and bypass Mod Organizer, maybe it won't notice... But also I've been loving not having to deal with the data folder and if it doesn't work then I'll have doomed myself to that fate again.

 

Anyway, next on my list of things to try is installing SKSE again and seeing if it breaks it (won't really prove much but if anything changes it'll be a good sign I should stop), installing some easily removable mod into the data folder and seeing if it reacts like it does to Mod Organizer being on, and of course cleaning the fan.

Seeing how well it ran just now, and seeing as my computer hasn't been screwing anything else up as bad as Skyrim, I'm sorta temped to leave the virus checking stuff for now. I don't know. I'm really lazy. We'll see where inspiration takes me.

Edited July 5, 2015 by Jackaline

[dragonslayer2k12]

I never use MO or wyre bash. I use the game launcher to manage mod load order lol. Then if I want other mods to play nice I mentally keep track of which mods have leveled lists and make a merged patch with TES5EDIT which only merges leveled lists for each mod selected in TES5EDIT and it works just fine. I don't know why people bother with MO though. I think wyre bash was better even the author of the unofficial patches mods uses wyrebash as he has said somewhere I read it.