Not the expert Chris is, but it is a safe bet you are runnig out of memory.
You say "My cs6 beta crashes after I do a lot of things such as content aware etc", which is a good clue.
With limited resources you can dial down the histry states, and watch which proceedues you use. If you can flatten image after a few image intense proceedures.
If you start with a 1 meg file you can gain in size rapidly. If you do a whole gaussian blur to a layer now you have a 2 meg file. Each time to do something it adds to file slze.
Liquify and probably content aware of a large section can eat up a lot of resources.
Seems like each new version requires more horsepower. A 64 bit machine with 8 gigs of RAM is now becoming the min. machine to be able to uses all the features of the program.
