Random "Loading area" crashes.

[ptbptb]

You could try the link in my signature. Until recently, I was bringing my system to it's knees (FPS of 8 wasn't uncommon) and even then, my game would never crash even after hours of playing.

 

Thanks for the link - I'm working through it now. Did you write it? If so suggest mentioning Game Booster in the Close background tasks page, because that's basically just what Game Booster does. Close background tasks. It's a whole lot easier (and safer) than playing "guess the non-essential" with Task Manager as well.

[ptbptb]

OK, tentatively, it seems to be working without crashes even with the Unofficial Patch active. I'm not sure which bit of advice did the trick - the following is what I did.

 

1. (Obviously) Re-activated the Unofficial Patches after deactivating them. Also did a BOSS re-order to get them back in the right place.

 

2. Installed Windom Earle's Oblivion Crash Prevention System (but I've had no sound to indicate it's had to do something so it probably isn't responsible for the improvement).

 

3. Turned off autosave.

 

4. Stopped saving over old save files.

 

5. Stopped using <ALT>+<TAB>

 

6. Stopped re-loading after death / mistakes (start game from scratch instead).

[XJDHDR]

@Ptbptb

You are correct. I did write down (or compile) that information. I'd never heard of Game Booster before now. I'll give it a try and see if it deserves a place on my site.

 

In your case, I would guess that not Alt-Tabbing anymore would have the most dramatic improvement. Starting a new game may be overkill but it's your call.

[XJDHDR]

Oops. Sorry for the double post.

[ptbptb]

You are correct. I did write down (or compile) that information. I'd never heard of Game Booster before now. I'll give it a try and see if it deserves a place on my site.

 

Have you tried Clean up ? (Apparently a Save Game bloat remover - I haven't used it myself yet).

 

I found Game Booster to be very easy to use but it's hard to gauge exactly how much performance is enhanced by killing background processes.

[XJDHDR]

I've only heard of Clean Up. The only feature I like about it though is the dead NPC cleaning. That could be useful for getting rid of bodies that never disappear (eg: Glarthir after he went homicidal on me).

 

I don't like the item clean up though. 9 times out of 10, an item is on the ground because I want it there. For example, one easy way of getting gold is to raid Rockmilk cave. My tactic is to enter the cave, take as much loot as I can, drop it all outside the cave, repeat until the cave is empty then cart it all to the nearest merchants who can buy it all. From what I understand in Clean Up's readme, after dropping off the second load of loot outside the cave, Clean Up will regard the first load of loot as ignored and delete it all.

 

Also, from what I have read, most save game bloat comes from badly designed mods. For the player to discard enough loot to cause a serious amount of bloat would be a feat in itself. And also a problem which is easily fixed by opening Wrye Bash, right-clicking on save game and click on Remove Bloat.

 

As for performance improvement from closing background tasks, I will try test this tomorrow. I suspect that there won't be much effect since Oblivion is more graphics than CPU demanding.