Do too many hard saves cause crashing/freezing and save corruption?

[joey]

I was playing the game with little to no issues for over 50 hours, game only crashed rarely.
But now the game is constantly freezing, and then when I reload the most recent save it gets stuck in the loading screen.
I just find it weird how I was playing for so long without issues and now its suddenly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the bed constantly.
I have over 100 hard saves, could they be causing the sudden dip in stability? Could deleting them help?
I don't have any mods and would like to keep it that way. Again, I had no issues for 50+ hours, so it seems to me like it should be possible to revert these issues without mods.

[joey]

Well whatever the case Im going to be deleting them since I know I will never return to any of those anyways except maybe the last 5-10 most recent ones

[psychotron666]

To fix the infinite loading, start a new game, skip the cutscenes (ESC), and when you wake up in the doc's room, reload your old save. That's a good immediate fix without mods, but it can happen again

[joey]

I decided to just get NVSE and NVAC, since deleting 90% of the saves didnt change anything, seems to be working fine now, hopefully it stays this way.

[Wandering Mania]

Might want to try looking up the 'Viva New Vegas' guide as well.
You may, or may not need the entire guide's recommendations** despite what it says; But I did find one thing that massively helped suppress the amount of crashing I was getting from it.

That one thing being the 'FNV 4gb patcher'***. After I installed that, I was able to play for a good 2+ hours without a single crash****.

**Purely up to your discretion, and/or how 'advanced' of a user you are.
***Mod found here: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/62552
****Full disclosure: I was also watching the game's RAM usage and very liberally using the "PCB" console command. As is explained in this video:
https://youtu.be/JCyD5Nk2KU0?si=syy_yXRG0ElYYCif