Why does Unity 5.1 crash while building a PC standalone, and how can I get around it?

Questions & Answers
1

I have a 560 MB project that I trying to build a PC standalone for the client. Each time I attempt to build the project using build settings → build, it crashes a bit more than halfway through the project. I have tried this on 3 Lenovo laptops with various specs, all running Windows 8.1 (I’ve included the specs below). On each the process crashes at various points. The project includes large video files, the largest being 4 MB, and it built once without them. However, the video files are required for the project, and I can’t compress them more without losing quality and making them unusable. Is there any work around?

Also, I should include that by crashing I mean Windows error reporting says that it has stopped running, and forces me to close it. No Unity Bug Report shows up. I have read multiple answers to this question, but all of them are specific to certain things I don’t use in my project, or have other issues that make them not applicable to my work. One solution I heard off is splitting it into separate builds, but I can’t seem to find something explaining how to do that. Are there any other solutions? Thank you.

PC stats (all of them are 64 bit):
Lenovo W540
8 GB RAM
Intel i7
NVIDIA Quadro K2100M
450 GB HDD with 37.6 GB free
Unity 5.1.2f1

Lenovo Y50
8GB RAM
Intel i7
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
1TB HDD with 700 GB free
Unity 5.1.1f1

Lenovo T450s
8GB RAM
Intel i5 vPro
Intel integrated graphics 5500
256 GB SSD with 40.4 GB free
Unity 5.1.2f1

2

Well, Windows 8.x is probably your problem. Do you have any other computers to try it on?

We used to have Windows 8 computers, 2 of them. The problem was they never wanted to work, especially 8.1. A ton of things we had read online said the same thing that we experienced - Windows 8 is bad. It has a hard time processing large amounts of data and has tons of incompatibility issues, with tons of programs. It may be that your system is incompatible with Unity, or just can’t handle the data.

From what we read online, some people didn’t have any of these problems. Most people did. In some cases, it seemed to depend on the model of the graphics card as to weather Internet Explorers or Chrome or FireFox would even run at all. Browsing the internet issue was fixed very quickly, but it still shows that Windows 8.x computers are pretty bad.

Conclusion: Everything I just said could be 100% irrelevant to your problem. But, they are always something to look into. It very well could be just because you have a Windows 8.x computer. You could always try changing the compatibility settings, but even that is buggy on Windows 8.1. Make older apps or programs compatible with Windows - Microsoft Support