GTA IV - Crashes constantly on 360

I finally blew the dust off GTA IV & installed it to start playing it for the first itme. My 360 is a refurb, only 2 months old.  Every other game i've tried, L4D, Fallout 3, Kane & Lynch, Bully, have worked fine (although a slight crash or two on some but very infrequent).  GTA IV has so far crashed about 10 times today & this is the first time I've played it starting today!  What the fuck is going on with this game?  It seems to crash if I go to the pause menu in front of the door, but other times it will crash while driving around during a mission.  It just freezes on screen & there is nothing I can do but push the power off button.

I'm gonna try & install the piece of shit to the hdd & see if it works any better.  So far, I'm pretty disappointed in how unstable this game is. The funny part is that I installed the update for it right away, you would think that a game almost a year old now wouldn't have so many bugs.

I don't know why everyone is having problems with this game on the 360. I've been playing it a lot recently cause of the DLC and it hasn't crashed on me once. But then again, mine isn't installed on my hard drive.

This is actually ironic, the game froze on me twice last night while I was online with a few users off this website. Both times I could just eject and be prompted back to the menu, but it still pissed me off. I didn't have this problem when it was installed. I uninstalled it before I went online because I installed something else in its place.

All it would take is for one byte of data to be corrupted by a small scratch on the surface of the disc for the game to start crashing.  I had this problem with a game, took it to a Game Crazy and they polished it for me.  Fixed the problem.

I have it installed. I haven't had a single freeze. :/ Sorry dude.

Oh, when I was attempting to join the Bombing Run last night, I got the red checkerboard screen and eventually the red ring. I think it had to do with the game update. My xbox was working fine seconds before on Rock Band 2, but as soon as I joined the game after all the loading and everything, my Xbox failed. :(

I have installed this game and I have no problems. If you have the space on your HDD, that is the best answer. It's all smooth sailing from there.

If you want stuff to not freeze on the 360, the recommended option is to install it.

Install it. Not only will it improve load times, but it'll make the game more stable.

"Install it. Not only will it improve load times, but it'll make the game more stable.
"

"AnimZero said:

"Install it. Not only will it improve load times, but it'll make the game more stable.
"

huh, i installed it and it ran soooo much worse. the pop in was terrible, load times were 2x longer, the game crashed a lot, it was horrible. so i uninstalled it and now it works fine, there's never any hiccups.
"

I went ahead & installed it & I haven't had a single crash since! (played it for about 3 hours).  I only have the 20G xbox hdd & had 7.2G of free space. After the install, I only have 550M remaining, but it works at least.  If I want the GTAIV expansion, looks like I'll need to upgrade to the 150G drive.  Thanks for all the advice, guys.

I haven't had a single crash in GTA4 ever (over 70 hours of play) except once that DIRECTLY lead to my 360 dying (months ago it crashed, turned it back on, system was dead).