Hi I am new to the forums and I recently bought fallout 3 on GOG but I keep getting the recurring problem that the game keeps locking up and the only thing I can do is to completely reboot my computer of course losing most of my progress.

Does anybody else have this problem and if so have you found a solution that I might try please?

Welcome!

What os do you use? 7 or 10? Bethesda's old games doesn't exactly like windows 10 it seems.

Have you tried https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/23631?

Also, in most cases you can terminate the fallout3.exe process without rebooting.

EDIT: Make sure you have downloaded, unpacked (go to the folder you unpacked to) and installed https://download.microsoft.com/download/8/4/A/84A35BF1-DAFE-4AE8-82AF-AD2AE20B6B14/directx_Jun2010_redist.exe

I know this doesn't solve your issue but I ran Fallout 3 GOTY for 75 hours with only a few crashes to desktop on a Win 7 PC with 16 GB RAM, I5 3570K and a GTX 769 OC.

This was the GoG version.

Have you tried to usual stuff like updating drivers, uninstall and reinstall the game, disable virus software etc.?

Really, where exactly is the source for this information that Beths games don't like Win10? The reason I ask is that I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, F3, F3 NV, F4, Skyrim (and Oldrim), all on Windows 10 without any issues whatsoever, and I have heavily modified versions of most of them. What is your system spec?
Are you running mods?
Are you using galaxy?
Have you installed outside windows folders?

I just wrote that as a simple explanation.

I dualboot 10 and 7 but stick to 7 (for games that is, I use Linux as my main), and I'm basing it on the fact that many of those with problems with Bethesdas games also use win10. These games haven't been touched by Bethesda in a long time so it's only natural they work relatively poorly on win10 (an os that is known to work poorly with many older games without workarounds). There can be many causes to these issues, but it's faster to just go through a list.

So yes, installing to other folders than a sys folder, quit using Galaxy, installing unofficial patches, and checking geforce experience/Radeon software or anti-vir software if there is something there, have helped some.

I've personally experienced only 2 (as far as I remember) reasons to why F3 crashes on my build; some background process that used about 100%, and due to mod.

EDIT: come to think of it, one time some files got corrupted (on a older build) but haven't seen any kind of that lately, so yes, in some cases corruption in memory, CPU, mamaboard or hdd can cause problems. Corruption in memory or data in transit happens far often than most people realize.