Is this the jist of it then? Or is it selective in some way?

Huh?

sorry, I mean this whole thing about game saves getting to big and causing constant ctds. Heard a few people say it is generally after 70 hours. Just has me a bit worried

No. No, not at all. Hey, I made to somewhere around 100. And can still to go places I've already been. It's only the new areas that won't load. You'll be fine if you just make a separate character for each quest line and don't wander off exploring lots of unrelated areas.

My problems began after 40 hours but still managed to keep going, after 70 hours it got real bad, now I cannot even load the save game, it's either a freeze up or instant silent CTD.

Do not use autosaves.

I think that's more of a problem with PS3s. My saves are about 15mb and I'm not getting any increased instability. A crash every couple hours at most - faster than that if I spawn a dozen dragons and giants inside Markarth and watch the hilarity ensue.

I'm at 77 hours, and I'm doing fine. Except for the occasional warped model (which a reload fixes anyway), I haven't seen a single bug.

mine started to crash every 30 min after getting to 75-80 hours it use to do it before that but not as frequently so I made a new character to play till a patch fixes the problem

I'm at 81 hrs and I've had 1 ctd and some long playtimes (5-6) hrs. I'm making hard saves and stashing them on my external HD. My autosave is on but I'm not relying on it. I've had some texture problems, but no different than everyone else. Watching & waiting.

Yup! Don't use autosaves, don't use quicksaves. This has been a problem since Morrowind, but Bethesda's never fixed it. Usually there's a simple mod to fix it for you though, I think there's one already on the Nexus.

I haven't played that long yet (20-30 hours) and experienced no crashes but just one. What do you recommend then? Disable all autosaves and don't use quicksaves to reduce the chance of getting crashes later?

I think i'm near 75-80 hours and while I CTD a little more frequently now (don't know if it's due to size or the new patch), I do notice I get some really problematic issues time to time trying to save where the game will lock up. Doesn't matter if its a new save or overwriting a save.

I have my autosaves for if I dies while exploring but I've been doing hardsaves every time I alt+tab or get off the game, especially since autosaves are auto oversaved when new players are played (learned that the hard way when my lil bro started a character)

Yeah. A lot of problems are from the auto/quicksave feature, which from what I understand overwrites the same file over and over, which can cause problems. Hard saving to a new file (using ESC) will avoid this, but you'll end up with an enormous save game folder.

Thanks

Glad to know this now when I still have the chance to avoid crashes...

yeah I've always avoied quicksaves and autosaves anyway from the morrowind days. In morrowind, it was good practice to completely shut down the game and restart it whenever you died, I wonder if this would help in skyrim?

Over 100hrs played on one character, using quick save and hard save and no problems.
I never rely on auto saves.

I've never quicksaved and the autosave is only used during the loading into dungeons so no idea where my save issue is coming from. I developed the hard save habit and avoid that overwriting thing as often as possible so I have close to 400 saves for my 1 character.

No such issues, broke 150 hours not long ago.

I'm at 80+ hours and still doing fine. I did start having these crashes at one point a while back, but managed to solve the problem by going back to a save made before the crashes started and playing from there. They never manifested themselves again as I caught up to where I had been. I did pretty much the same thing I did the first time after I went back with one exception ... the first time I had a companion with me, the second time I decided not to recruit her. In general, I've avoided companions where possible because of this, though I can't be sure she was the problem.

Something corrupted my game, but apparently it wasn't unavoidable. Because of this and the glowing eyes bug, I've taken up the habit of keeping a history of periodic saves ... at least one between each quest ... so that I can always go back to a fairly recent point before I picked up any problem to see if I can avoid getting it again. So far, so good.

This. It took me about 20 hours into Oblivion to stop closing doors behind me like I used to do in MW. Still have the habit of making a new, hard save every time though. Autosave is disabled and I don't even know which key is quicksave.

I haven't had any issues yet with Quick Save. I Quick Save and Quick Load left to right. It's the life of a stealthy archer.

accually turning off quick saves didn't do anything i just crashed twice after turning off the quick saves and deleting my extra save files it since my last post

Edit: so far i haven't been getting any crashes with this mod http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1013 not saying it wont crash later i haven't played with it more then a hour and 20 min but so far it hasn't crashed every 20-30 min like it has been doing.

this doesn't make sense to me: when a hard disk "re-writes" a file, it actually writes the new file, in a different location , then erases the old file (or actually erases it's directory info on the hdd). Since each and every save file gets larger than the file before - the new file won't fit into the existing file's space on the hdd. SO why should it matter that the name of the file is QUICKSAVE or AUTOSAVE??

the only possiblilty I can see is random corruption of save game files occurs, but is only really noticed by the community when multiple people lose the "same file name" like QUICKSAVE or AUTOSAVE. And since most people never go back and try to re-load all their 400 named save games, they don't know if any of the files are bad. But peopel who use QUICK and AUTO saves a lot notice when the files do go bad, even if the incidence of file corruption is the same as for any other file name