Netrogor

Thank you, though I had a lot of motivation from my wife. Her playing Skyrim on a laptop she got for her birthday a few weeks ago, right next to me, as my laptop shutdown at random trying to, drove me to figure it out. What it boils down to - Q&A. Quality Assurance. Some major titles are void of such simple work, because big-name publishers (i.e.- EA Games) want to release on a certain day. I think Bethesda's last Q&A approved release was Morrowind, TBH. EDIT: Fixed spelling mistakes - also in the service (Army Corps of Engineers) and just got up an hour ago (0400) for a special, mandatory Christmas FRG. Still waking up.

Potential solution -> So, after reading into NVidia GPUs for awhile, I discovered something called, "Performance Levels." My card (GT330M) has P0, P1, and P2/12. P0 is the idle state, when the GPU is below 10% activity, as determined by... WINDOWS! P1, I believe, is below 40% activity. And P2 is full on gaming, when it recognizes that you are indeed gaming. Having real-time logs made and repeatedly allowing Skyrim to shut my laptop down, I discovered that just before every crash, the voltage on the card dropped to P0 state (going from 0.95V to 0.8V), while the clocks remained at P2 state. Oh JOY! Of course my laptop would shutdown when the GPU is trying to run at full power, without having full power! For now, I've underclocked the P1 and P2 states (using NVidia inspector) so that the sudden loss of power won't shut my laptop down (it's working... so far, got almost an hour in Skyrim, and haven't managed more than ten minutes since this s*** began). I am very tempted to look into a GPU bios editor (i.e.- Fermi Bios Editor) to adjust the way the P0/P1/P2/12 states work, so that P0 is the equivalent of P1, and P1 and P2 are always at full-blast. This doesn't mean everyone's sharing the same problem, mind you - just one unique bit that I discovered for myself (and will thoroughly test by playing the f*** outta Skyrim, until it either fails or I feel satisfied).

See this thread -> http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/456889-skyrim-complete-pc-crashes/page__st__1530 If the problem pops back up, you can join the rest of us in getting zero support to fix it. ^^

Since a thread I posted in isn't getting any replies, and I found this one, quoting and adding what I've said thar, to this. Oh, and I went to sleep leaving my laptop on a burn-test using Furmark - it was still going, warm but with a notable peak of 66 degrees Celsius, after more than six hours, when I got up seven this morning (-5:00 EST). EDIT: I'm going to see if I can't get a copy of NVidia drivers from 2011... see if Skyrim works using those (it was fine up till I took a break from playing it five months ago), though I sincerely doubt it.

Bump.

Been googling for others who've encountered issues similar to what I've hit, and I'm rather curious - other people who have had such issues simply never received replies, and the issue seems to have never been addressed... So, here's a breakdown - I have a Sony vpcf122fx laptop. I used to play Skyrim on it all the time, and other than the occasional CTD from loading up too many mods, it was flawless. Now, after some months, my wife has gotten herself a laptop as well (with Windows 8 on it), and she's playing Skyrim... which made me want to play again. I'm not a scrub when it comes to computers, been building and fixing them since before I could read, and I know how to run memtest86, furmark, and other programs to stress-test my PCs, in addition to checking temps and figuring out if it's an overheating issue. On load my laptop has managed to peak at 65 degrees Celsius running Furmark on a burn-test for an hour. Used to peak up to 69 degrees, but I took it apart after the issues started up last week (with trying to play this game again) thinking perhaps there was a heating issue, and put MX-2 thermal grease down (the stock grease was globbed on horrifically, thank God I found an excuse to do that s*** myself) on the CPU and GPU. Specs (as I've modified a few things) are as follows -> CPU- Intel Corei7 @ 1.73GHz w/Turbo Boost to 2.93GHz GPU- NVidia GT330M RAM- 8GB Kingston Memory @ 1600MHz 9-9-9-27 timings (stock, though the laptop only had 2x2GB sticks, I upgraded it, and yes that was done before I stopped playing Skyrim early this year, and no issues arose from the upgrade) HDD- 300GB Western Digital @ 7200rpm (stock was a 500GB seagate, which died on me, as one would expect from seagate HDs) I can play... ohhh lets think... any other game for any period of time without my laptop shutting down or restarting itself. Natural Selection 2 Dawn of War 2 COD Modern Warfare 3 Mount&Blade (+ Warband expansion) Cortex Command And so many others I flit about during my downtime... Now, considering NS2 requires an immensely superior machine to run it compared to Skyrim... and it runs fine and dandy under the most extreme conditions... me tinkz that there is an issue with Skyrim, specifically. ATM I'm going to rock a clean-wipe of my audio drivers, and put specific Win7-64bit ones I grabbed from the realtek website (I already performed a clean-boot after wiping my HD and reinstalling my O/S with only the drivers from its out-of-box stage, then installed Skyrim, patches, and the mods I want, and tried running it with and without mods). I'll get back to ya'll if the audio driver update fixes it, otherwise post something that perhaps wasn't openly posted for others. EDIT: Oh, and the only thing that pops up in the Event Viewer... ID41, Kernel-Power 63. No crash or dump logs. EDIT2: Oh, and when it freezes up, blacks out the screen, and goes to shutdown... the audio continues to play for a second or two, without skipping, as though all is fine.

Personally, I'd love to see a type of class that lets you start off as a mage... not trapped in the Circle of Magi tower. Such as being a Dalish Elf mage. Or being a human mage raised by an apostate. Perhaps, after I've finished work on my DOW2 mod (dawn of war 2, i iz author of CampaignMods), I'll work on making these class+gamestart options myself... :?