So I've been playing Skyrim for around 30 hours total so far. When I first played the game for around three hours or so, I didn't get the first day patch as I wasn't connected to xbox live. I dealt with lags when just walking around in general, and also freezes in which some recover and others make me have to restart the console. When I managed to connect and download the patch, I would have to say much of the lag has stopped, and I've not crashed a single time for a good 25 or so hours of gameplay. Now though, I'm experiencing the same problems (plus arrows stuck in the knee for prolonged periods of time and an unusual decrease of finisher moves scenes) in my first few hours of gameplay without the patch. I don't really know why it's happening, but I've explored about most of the surface of Skyrim. I'm not far into the main story line, haven't even talked to the Greybeards yet, but I have completed the Battle of Whiterun on the side of the Empire; this is and also when I first visited Markarth is when the lags and freezes started again.

I've just read the article about how Skyrim runs better in terms of texture when not installed on the HDD, and somethings about clearing the cache when I researched about my problems. I have the game installed on my 20 GB HDD at the moment, I have a little more than 5 GB of free space, only another game installed, New Vegas. I saw some pictures of installed and not installed textures and their differences, but I'm clueless on whether this will really solve the lag and freezes I'm experiencing now.

Please give me some insights on the problem, being outside of Tamriel makes me sad
Thanks

describe this lag you are having. does it lag when there is one or more npc on screen and not lag if there are no npc's?

I mostly seem to notice when just running in the wild, noticed also that vegetation is spawning at delayed rates too, it still lags when npcs are around, but I don't see too much of a difference.