I have figured exactly what was causing my crashes and like many of you, thought it was mods or a corrupted file. In fact it had nothing to do with that soon as I figured out what my issue was my game NEVER CRASHED AGAIN. Sometimes it's a corrupted file but most of us don't look beyond whats in our GTA:4 folder after we fixed everything but whats in our computer itself. It's your graphics card, yes your graphics card. The problem as to why we're crashing so much when we first play the game with ELS or play without ELS is because the graphics card temps are overheating and causing the game to crash. It's a safety setting in all graphic cards that prevent them from over heating or frying. If you have a custom build computer or put in an aftermarket graphics card we know it has a pretty big fan on it. The game takes its toll on your graphics card. Do you ever notice how when you crash you have about 3-5 additional even police cars in your screen that's running ELS? Or when your in game the fan doesn't crank up its speed to cool down the video card? That's because you need a video card driver that will automatically adjust the speed to cool down your GPU. After about a week and a half of testing files and looking for corrupted data in the logs. Nothing really pointed out that it was a mod issue or an odd file. NEVER once did I think about the temps my graphics card was getting while in game. Before I updated my driver my GPU was getting 66-70c. I thought WOW that's why I'm crashing. SOLUTION: I have an EVGA Nvidia GTX 470 GPU. So I downloaded the latest driver called EVGA Precision (Advanced Graphics tuning.) It should work on ALL graphics cards. Its just a tuner. I don't mess with any of the core clocks or shader clocks. Only if you want to over clock your GPU but I like to walk on egg shells But it has an Amazing feature in the options called "Software automatic fan control." It works wonders. Ever since I've used that option. My game never crashes. The Mods I use are, NYC "Flashing lights" mod. ALL Police cars, Ambulances and Firetrucks have fully functioning ELS in game. End Result... NO crashes. It is amazing. Anyways I hope this helped you and everyone else thats having issues crashing. Give this a try and let me know if it helped. Thanks for reading.

Edited September 27, 201114 yr by Silentdeath

GPU With Fan = Graphics CARD

GPU Without fan = Graphics Chip (Usually found in Laptops)

My laptop has a GPU Chip, but it works wonders (check my sig)

Jus' saying, Never EVER use gamebooster. It completely FK'ed my old system and a few others too..

If you have a HP, it should have a program that lets you configure fan speed, i've got my setting on performance..

Plus I've got it resting on a cooling pad with speed control fans.

BUT, I can see how this could be helpful to people with older desktops.

EVGA Precision (which I have used since day one of using EVGA cards) will only work for Nvidia cards, I believe.

Most of what you say is true, but only if game crashes are caused by the overheating of your graphics card. Some graphics cards simply can not run GTA IV at all, which will cause texture problems and could result in crashing.

The automatic fan speed in Precision is good, although I always set it myself to ~75% on my 560 Ti when playing a game. I also set, in Precision, the 75% fan speed profile to be the default 3D profile so all games will automatically trigger the profile so I don't have to press any hotkeys to change the profile.