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