First I want to say that Skyrim is brilliant and I absolutely love it but these recent issues have really been getting on my nerves so I wanted to see if anyone had suggestions/advice.

The game ran smoothly for the first 15+ hours or so and then my console started to freeze. I'd be able to restart and begin playing again from the last save point. Then, after a bunch of freezes and screen tearing, my console got the 3 red rings of death. The console was super old, a PRO mode,l so I figured Skyrim pushed it to the end during my marathon gaming sessions and the console just died of old age.

So I went out and bought a 4GB XB360 slim. I transferred my old save file to the 4GB micro unit and I'm playing off that. The game is NOT installed on the HD.

Now the game does not freeze, but the load times are painfully long. Is this an issue of playing off the 4GB micro unit that comes with the console? For instance, the load screen will be completely blank for a few minutes without music and then the load screen will come in and load from there. Also, when opening a door in a town or something it takes forever to load when previously there was little or no loading involved.

I'm also experiencing lag. I'll be fighting a dragon or running around Skyrim and the image just pauses, like you're playing on the internet, and the game needs to catch up and it eventually loads.

Sorry if my grievances are unclear technically but these issues are annoying me and do not seem normal at all. I hope a lot of these are the FPS issues that we'll be addressed in the next patch.

Comments?

I'm alone with these issues?

This reminded of something, Xbox HDD's from the 20GB model (which i have) and the above model's all have 6.5GB space reserved for the cache. I have just googled the 4GB model in an attempt to find info about it but can't see anything so far, maybe this is the problem? It's said in the texture scaling sticky that Skyrim make's heavy use of the Xbox cache so since 6.5GB space seem's universal on all other HDD's make's me wonder how big it is on the 4GB.

Thanks for the response, Nolan.

I'm going to return the 4GB slim and get a 250GB console on Black Friday, we'll see if that changes anything.

As annoying as the issues are, the game is still mind-blowing.

Personally that's a better option as the bigger Hard-drive's are not that much more expensive but better over the long term.

Why didn't you stick your old hd onto the slim?.. do they not fit together? When I bought the "arcade" xbox version to replace my old three ringed version I simply put the old hd on the arcade.
I think I might have had to transfer my accounts or something.. can't remember.

The old HD does not fit on the slim and you can't play off it connected via USB either.

The clue is in the name - Slim