Skyrim crashes when I'm using lightning spells.

[elwaysdad]

Skyrim normally plays fine for me except when I start casting lightning spells and it will cause the game to crash anywhere from immediately to a couple of minutes into my casting. I'm trying to level Destruction so I repeatedly use lightning spells against targets as it seems to be the most viable elemental spell against all enemies. I have Windows XP.

 

[rwayne]

What kind of graphics card do you have and what is the driver version?

 

[mercer95]

you might just need to go back a few saves, skyrim is a bitch for this, i had the same problem that when ever i opened my magic tab it crashed, just a suggestion if you cant fix it, a last resort kind of thing as its annoying going through all of your saves until you find one that doesn't crash and you might have to go back quite far.

 

[elwaysdad]

What kind of graphics card do you have and what is the driver version?

I use a laptop and my video card is a Nvidia 9600m GT and I updated the driver to the latest available when I first started having problems: Nvidia 266.58.

I already checked my sound as that was the first thing I read online that could cause crashes. I did notice that it crashed far less in a day time setting then at night using lightning spells and that the slower fps spells i.e., fire and ice, have no problems what so ever, so I'm thinking it has something to do with fps 'burst' for lack of a better term that my video card or cpu can't handle. I'm just not sure what to do about it if anything if that is the case.

 

[fulle]

The game is trying to tell you, in it's own subtle way, that magic scaling is poor end game, and you should switch to being a bow assassin.

 

[iyzik]

There are two things I would recommend trying (besides being a bow assassin ^ lol i agree with that one too) but try this:
-Go to Documents/My Games/Skyrim and delete Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini and let it auto detect again and reset the graphics and configs, that usually helps.
-Assuming you have it on Steam, verify the local cache so it can fix any messed up game data that might be causing this.

 

[elwaysdad]

The game is trying to tell you, in it's own subtle way, that magic scaling is poor end game, and you should switch to being a bow assassin.

Lol, you could be right, although it's pretty sweet to watch an elder dragon bite the dust in about 12 to 15 seconds using Lightning Storm.

 

[themegadinesen]

The game is trying to tell you, in it's own subtle way, that magic scaling is poor end game, and you should switch to being a bow assassin.

^ This