Skyrim Crashes

[Sonicron]

Looks like I caught this little bug, too...

This is ridiculous. I'm playing Skyrim on PC (Steam, digital copy) and I've clocked 114 hours so far with only a handful of crashes, and only to desktop.
Ever since I actually got started on the main questline and ventured into the Riften Ratway to find some old coot, I've been experiencing hard shutdowns at irregular intervals; so far I've had anywhere between 4 and 29 minutes of game time before my computer would simply shut down without warning. What's even stranger, my computer doesn't even give me an error message upon rebooting, so it apparently views what it's doing as a regular system operation within normal parameters.
My cooling fans are making horrendous noise when the game crashes, but then again they've been doing that for 114 hours without incident (actually more like 2+ years, to be exact), so I don't see what the problem is all of a sudden, i.e. I'm having a hard time believing this is all because of hardware trouble.

Needless to say I'm a bit miffed. I've been having enormous amounts of fun with Skyrim, but if this crap persists my entire experience will be coloured by it. :\

 

[JET1971]

Looks like I caught this little bug, too...

This is ridiculous. I'm playing Skyrim on PC (Steam, digital copy) and I've clocked 114 hours so far with only a handful of crashes, and only to desktop.
Ever since I actually got started on the main questline and ventured into the Riften Ratway to find some old coot, I've been experiencing hard shutdowns at irregular intervals; so far I've had anywhere between 4 and 29 minutes of game time before my computer would simply shut down without warning. What's even stranger, my computer doesn't even give me an error message upon rebooting, so it apparently views what it's doing as a regular system operation within normal parameters.
My cooling fans are making horrendous noise when the game crashes, but then again they've been doing that for 114 hours without incident (actually more like 2+ years, to be exact), so I don't see what the problem is all of a sudden, i.e. I'm having a hard time believing this is all because of hardware trouble.

Needless to say I'm a bit miffed. I've been having enormous amounts of fun with Skyrim, but if this crap persists my entire experience will be coloured by it. :\

Thats a straight up overheating issue. get some canned air, open the box up and clean it out.

I get a crash to desktop randomly except a cave where I get it everytime i go too far in it. i have a quest to kill all the monsters in the cave and got a quest to kill a dragon on the other side of it. only way i can get to the dragon is play mountain goat and come from behind, and the same thing to finish the other quest as the cave is very short. and thats why im on the forums and not playing because it just happened 5 minutes ago lol.

 

[Sonicron]

Thats a straight up overheating issue. get some canned air, open the box up and clean it out.

But... why? As I said, the fans are no louder (or quieter) than the day I first started playing Skyrim, and that was when I had just cleaned my rig's guts; my understanding was that the fans were simply blasting full power because Skyrim was a demanding game at high settings. My comp has been chugging merrily along for the past few weeks without incident, so how come it 'overheats' all of a sudden? (Maybe the answer is obvious, but I'm somewhat ignorant when it comes to tech more complicated than your average toaster.)

 

[XMark]

I think pretty much everyone gets crashes to desktop on the PC version.

I'm averaging about 1 crash every 4 hours myself.