Crashing during loading screens

[harlequinromance]

So my thread is a little different. I know it crashes because my graphics card is VERY old and severely needs to be replaced. Skyrim crashes about every 20 minutes between loading screens, so badly I have to restart my whole computer. Is there a way to help this in the least? I know I need a new graphics card but don't have the money and wanna play Skyrim until then. Is there a mod that'd help unload the burden from my graphics card? Any setting I could turn it to like maybe the lowest graphics? I realize it'll still crash probably, but every 20 minutes is too often and I might as well not play.

[Jannifer]

It is possible to play Skyrim with a less than wonderful graphics card. I'm playing that way myself. First, make sure that you aren't running any texture mods except, maybe, skin textures and maybe a couple of player-only armors. I don't use any particular performance enhancing mods or utilities. I'm just very careful about what I load.

 

You might also try verifying your game cache through Steam. It could simply be that your Skyrim files are corrupted and causing the CTDs. To do this, open Steam and go to your Library. Hover over Skyrim and right click. Go to the bottom of the menu and choose Properties. Click on the third tab from the left (Properties). Then, click the bottom button (Verify Integrity of Game Cache). Let that run. When it's finished, open the vanilla launcher (don't open with SKSE, if you use that). It will tell you that it's detecting your video hardware again. When that's done, take a moment and click on the Advanced button. Disable (uncheck) FXAA, Reflect Trees, Reflect Sky and Reflect Objects. With those things unchecked, I can run the vanilla textures on High with Radial Blur Quality set on Medium.

 

My computer is an abacus. It's only a dual core processor with 4 gigs of RAM and 512K of video memory on an Nvidia 9500 GT card. Yes, I get crashes and freezing; it's the nature of Elder Scrolls games to push a system hard. However, if I'm getting crashes and freezing every few minutes, then something is wrong. Once I find the problem and fix it, then I can usually play for reasonable periods without crashes or freezing.