It sucks when it crashes....
I went through that stage when I had a 32mb video card before, an open case cpu with a fan full blast to keep my cpu run cool.
It also cool working on sketchup, together listening in a winamp, and browsing internet.
but in the end we all depend on the hardwares of our computer.
I dont have the latest cpu. Dual core athlon64 x2, 2gig ram, 512mb video, but i still make sure to close other programs when woking with sketchup just to make sure I dont get crahsed and have a better response.
try to download the latest one, it did save my time once.
Tesmeko