Hi Bethesda and community members. I know I'm not the only one out there who is "suffering" from unexpected freezes and choppy framerates. These are the few mods I have installed:

Horse Armor
Beast Follower Pack (unsubscribed and removed, before entering beta1.5 patch)
Xenius' Improved Eyes
Craftable Fur Hoods
Magic Font Text
Ghostlier Ghostblade
Arcane Archery
Deacon's Frostier Frost
Bound Daedric Armor (thinking of removing; haven't used it)

(most of the mods I installed after 1.5 beta and official 1.5 patch; save for Magic Font & Xenuis' Eyes)

The only other things I have installed are Bethesda's HD Texture Packs (1 & 2).

Here are my system specs:
ASUS G73JH model
ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5800 series
Intel Quad Core processor (I think it's 1.7ghz)
Windows 7 64-bit
8GB RAM

Since I have been having issues with the ATI Catalyst drivers (12.1 or 12.2) I haven't bothered installing any drivers; therefore,
I am running Skyrim on my Asus' factory settings. By default, Skyrim sets my game graphics to High. In order gain some breathing
room I have lowered AA from x8 to x4, and my shadows from High to Medium.Details are set to High (but I increased to Ultra
because I didn't think it had much fps impact). I didn't mess with any of the sliders.

Unfortunately for me, the game stutters quite often, particularily between Solitude, Dawnstar, and Winterhold ( I blame the snowflakes!); however, the game stutters on occassion in other places as well (they all tend to be outside). As for the freezing issues, I get no prewarning. Generally they too occur outside, sometimes during fights or when I'm just going for a stroll down the road. I know Skyrim still has many issues to work out, so I'm only using one character. If I can remember correctly he's on his 310th save? I think most of his save files are about 8kb, but I make the habit of erasing old save files. I make sure to save two previous files, just in case my current one goes haywire. So this is what my Saves folder would look like: Autosave 1.bak Autosave 1.esp Autosave 2.bak Autosave 2.esp Autosave 3.bak Autosave 3.esp Save 310 size: 8kb Save 309 size: 6kb Save 308 size: 8 kb Also, I keep the first autosaves and first gamesave of the character because deleting those screws up the game somehow when you make a new character. (I learned this from experience; do not do what I did because I was forced to delete the character! That character suffered from terrible CTDs and other strange problems.Just don't do it.) This was a different character from the one I am playing now. I haven't altered my current character's save files in any way, except for deleting old files every so often. I have been playing Shademyth since the 1.3 patch, for those who are curious. Please reply to my thread if you have any suggestions to either the stuttering or freezing issues. Thanks!~

Komeyt hin Thu'um!

(double post,sorry)

@Shademyth: I've seen a couple of posts referring to problems with chars if initial autosave files are deleted - I deleted mine (as why would you keep them?) What kind of problems are we talking about here, and am I going to have to start again??
Is there a thread somewhere about this?

Hey Tigerseye, I know it sounds silly to keep them, but I wouldn't have touched them if I were you. You might or might not experience CTDs, or more frequently glitches or bugs with your current character...which can make certain quests unplayable- that sort of stuff. You may be safe since you you're still using just one character. The sort of problems I mentioned happen more frequently when you make a new character and don't have the Autosave files (although the game will make a set of new ones for each character). The Save File numbers won't start at 001, instead they'll be much higher, like 256 etc.

So hopefully you won't have to start again but if your quests start acting weird or don't complete, or if you're getting CTDs a lot, I suggest you start over. If you happen to have more than one character, be sure to keep the initial Autosaves WITH that character. You can make a new folder and name it, then drag and drop EVERYTHING into the folder when you're not using that
chari. The only reason I warn people of this is because it messed up one of my older characters ( messing with the first Autosave files).

Thanks Shademyth!

I do have 2 characters, in fact - the one I play now and the first one I made on day of release. I don't have the initial saves from either of them! Never had any problems with my vanilla khajiit, but my current char is experiencing a lot of CTD's... really don't want to start all over again, but would rather than deal with this nonsense

May well take your advice in archiving unused saves, too. Not a bad plan...

I find it easier to keep all of my characters in different folders. So far this is what it looks like:

Jadier Roux [folder]
Svanir Windsong [folder]
Shademyth [folder]
Soul-Cares-Not [folder]

Initial Autosaves (for Shademyth)
Shademyth's Save Files (no more than 3 are here
at a time)

(you are most welcome by the way)

Go to the forum "FPS Drops after updating to 1.5" on 23 March or other forums around that time regarding the issue. May help explain the issue with 1.5
I've decided not to play until they resolve the issue since I was right at the beginning of the Imperial & Stormcloak war outside of Whiterun. The freeze up's are extremely bad so I'll wait.

From your video card description it would seem that you are running on a laptop.
Many laptop GPUs do not offer much in the way of video memory. Can you confirm how much you have?
Anything less than 1024 MB of video memory would easily explain the heavy stuttering and choppy framerates you report with the HD texture packs installed. (Some mods can seriously contribute to this problem as well.)

Shademyth, do you keep all of these folders in the game directory, where they should be anyway, or elsewhere? I don't want to screw things up by placing them wrongly...

I keep all of my save folders/files in the My Documents>My Games>Skyrim>Saves (folder). If you put them anywhere else, the game won't read them as there, so when you start Skyrim up your only option would be to start a new game. Since you have more than 1 character, keep the files out that you want to play, in the Saves folder. When you want to switch to your alt, drag and drop the files you left out into a seperate folder (which you'll name as Character 1 or whatever you want).If you wanted to, you can have the chari folders elsewhere on your computer, but for efficiency, I keep all of mine in the Saves folder area.

To place the chari save files back into the main saves folder, just copy/paste the chari files you want to play. Since you'll have two copies of save files (unless you placed the chari folders somewhere other than Skyrim>Saves), copy then paste into the Skyrim>Saves, and then you can safely delete the "extra" ones in the chari folder. Drag and drop the folders back into the same folder when you want to play with the other chari. Rinse and repeat. (When you delete the "extra" save files, it will not delete the ones you placed outside the folder, so don't worry about it).
So it will look much like this:
Skyrim>Saves
Character folder 1
Character folder 2
all initial autosaves (for Character 2)
Character 2 save files hang out here not in a folder

I have 6 GB of RAM on my Asus model. I know Asus brands tend to get hot quickly when playing PC games, but I generally don't have issues with computer itself from overheating. However, my power brick always gets burning hot- should I worry about this? I use a power cord and never plug my laptop directly into a wall socket; I've heard of power surges happening when people do that.

There's virtually no way you can screw up with placing the files, even if you tried really hard. Just remember to keep the initial autosaves with each character- including when you drag the files out of a character folder when you want to play with that character. I suggest that wherever you make your character folders, create a copy of them too, just in case a Skyrim update causes all hell to break loose; you'll have a backup to save your characters.

Yes, I'm doing all that now - made copies of virtually everything and started a fresh game. Just had my first ctd on the new char though, which at lvl 5, with a save less than 4mb, I'm not too happy about! I think the game is just generally a bit buggy and unstable at present; I never had any issues at all until 1.4, and never so many as now.

Got rid of a load of mods too (well, as much as you can get rid of them without re-formatting the pc)

Did you manually get rid of the mods (not using nexus mod manager)? Yes the game is buggy, so it may be the patch causing the issue.

In regards to autosaves....I have them totally disabled and the few times the engine forces one I delete it. I would keep my first one for new character creation but the opening scene is actually enjoyable to me and thus I delete them all. I hard save and I never write over a previous save. I keep about ten saves in my save directory and back the rest up in another folder. I have had zero game ending/breaking glitches since the stability that 1.3 offered. Of course autosave totally disabled (also don't use quicksave as I play with my controller) means you are on your own.

Here is my best advice of when and how to hard save. Do it before loading a new cell as opposed to right after of course interior saves are better but I tend to AFK for about ten minutes in an inn when I am done for the evening and then save. I also do a save before entering any interior dungeons as opposed to right after entrance unless I fast traveled to the location in which I use the AFK save format from above.

Why? Well first off I like to save on my own terms but after the forced autosave at the beginning of the Alduin encounter the autosave being loaded led to him bugging out and the hard save previous to that (right before speaking to Paarth) worked fine. I replicated this over and over and thus decided autosave is FTL in regards to causing bugs. In the end its personal pref but I have no issues(other than the occasional ATI flickering water after fast travel bug that is well known). In fact I actually do my best to try and break the game and have yet to be able to since 1.3.

1.5.26 froze on me the first time I tried it out. It was on a new game during the wagon ride down to Helgen. I had my ini files set to read-only, however, and as soon as I cleared the flag and allowed the game to modify the ini files, it ran fine thereafter.

i dont get these autosave things.
I am on my 4th char now, and the previous 3 char, i copied all their saves into a folder with their names. Therefore, when i start a new char, the save goes back to 001. Now correct me if i m wrong, but ppl mentioned that if I did this, then i will have problems with CTD and bugs right?

btw i am still on 1.4.21, should i update to 1.5.26?

From the looks of it not if you don't need to use Steam in online mode. I would hold off unless your current version is causing issues.

"People" as in me? Yeah you will have more issues with bugs and CTDs;however, since you already keep each chari in seperate folders, you'll be pretty okay. I think the higher number saves, regardless will get bugs/glitches moreso than earlier saves. I have no idea why this happens. I guess it has something to do with reloading previous cleared dungeons and the engine's cleaning up dead bandits and whatnot. If you'd like to update to 1.5.26, just save your Saves file to someplace other than Skyrim>Saves so it won't get overwritten.Those saves will stay at Version 1.4.21 until you play them in 1.5.26 and save them in 1.5.26.