Xbox 360 + Fifa 10 / World Cup 2010 Freezing Solution

This is quite a mundane and factual update, but hopefully it’ll help anyone who had the same problem as me and find their way here.

I switched from my long-time football game favourite series of Winning Eleven/Pro Evo last year after years of dedication because the Fifa series finally made the jump to being a great game, whereas WE/PES stayed the same and feels very stale. I’d been enjoying Fifa 10 for a long time when I started getting random crashes; the game freezes and the buttons are unresponsive. At first it wasn’t too frequent, and I put it down to overheating or an odd glitch. I started noticing that it doesn’t happen when I take the game to my friends’ houses which made me start looking for a solution.

When I first started searching online I noticed there are a lot of crashing problems being mentioned on various forums, but with no real solution. I stuck at it until recently when the predictable re-vamp for the World Cup came around with Fifa World Cup 2010, and a demo was released over Xbox Live. The demo didn’t crash once, which I took as a sign to say that they’d fixed whatever the problem was, and when I found I had some unspent Tessco clubcard vouchers I decided to treat myself to the full game…

…which crashed. So began a trying email conversation between me and EA support, who seemed completely incapable of reading anything I’d actually written, giving me such gems of advice as ‘run dxdiag on your computer’. Yeah, thanks for that, I mean, my problem’s with a completely different format, but I’m sure that’ll help. I eventually found a Microsoft guide for possible solutions to the freezing problem and worked my way through that. After a lot of trial and error, frustration and annoyance, and even some money, I think I’ve finally found a solution. So for anyone finding their way here from google, tearing your hair out and just wanting to play the game, here’s a list of what didn’t work for me, and a solution that did.

Things I tried that didn’t work, but may for you:

  • Clean the disc. Pretty obvious, but just check the 360 isn’t scratching the disc.
  • Delete Fifa save games and option files. This was suggested on a forum, apparently they can become corrupt and cause problems.
  • Make sure the 360 isn’t overheating. Don’t sit your console or PSU in deep pile carpet, or in the oven or something – common sense people.
  • Delete the 360 cache file. Fifa stores data in the cache, if this becomes corrupted it can cause freezing. From memory, from your dashboard go to System Settings > Storage > Press Y and choose the option to clear the cache.

What actually worked for me:

  • Replace the hard drive.

The last suggestion on the Microsoft guide is to try removing the 360’s hard drive while the console’s off and play without it on. I did this and managed to play several matches in a row without a single problem, and to be honest I really didn’t think it would’ve been the problem. Apparently it can be symptomatic of a problem with the hard drive, so whether it’s on its way out or not I don’t know. I bought a cheap, new 120GB hard drive on ebay (which I’m still waiting for) and started looking for a data transfer cable.

Microsoft make a data transfer/migration kit consisting of a special USB cable and disc, which allows you to move your stuff from one drive to a new one. My problem was that I couldn’t find one for love nor money, and was getting annoyed. Microsoft will sell you one over the phone for £16, but if you ever need to migrate from one drive to another, DON’T BUY IT! Since the recent dashboard update, the 360 now recognises USB storage devices as storage for games and files, so I hooked up my portable hard drive, chose the ‘customise’ option from the 360 storage menu when preparing a USB device, and allocated 16GB (the maximum) to the console. I copied everything on my 360 HD to the portable one and then disconnected the Xbox’s hard drive.

Ever since I’ve been playing with my console, and more importantly Fifa, without a single problem, direct from the USB drive. There are no problems or issues with doing it, I honestly can’t tell the difference between the portable drive and the built-in one. I’ll still be using the 120GB one once it arrives, so I can download more demos and add-ons, and also so I can install the games I play a lot, but as a stopgap the USB drive is an excellent alternative.

So yeah, if you’ve got a freezing problem with Fifa 10, Fifa World Cup 2010, or any other game for that matter, try the steps outlined above. Hopefully it won’t come to the ‘spending money’ option I had to resort to, but if it does at least you know there’s a good chance it’ll work.

3 Responses

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