Right been playing for some time now and had no more crashes, I;m not 100% sure if i've cleared the problem but perhaps one or a combination of the above steps has helped
I cleaned a load of dust out of my pc, especially on the heat sync over my processor
installed that MSI afterburner and set framelimit and framestep to 50 ish
using in game option set frame limit to 60
also updated some windows files (windows 7)
will update if i get any more crashes but i think this has been the longest i've played now with no problems. Was actually strange exiting the game manually