I just bought the slim Tuesday. However, now Gears 3 momentarily freezes on me every time I reach a checkpoint. What's causing this? It's really annoying. I don't recall this ever happening on my old 360. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a common problem on the slims?

is it just framerate lagging, or a full freeze-up? do you have any other games to test? Check the disc for any scratches/smudges, or anything that would obstruct a proper read

It freezes fully for a second or two, but it only when I reach a checkpoint. All my other games run fine both during checkpoints and in general. The disk is only a couple weeks old. There is a very small faint scratch on it, but otherwise it looks really good.

My original does that too, and I thought it was just a glitch in the game or perhaps my drive laser is going. When I run it off of my jtag hard drive though, it works fine. I'm not sure if it's really anything to worry about.