The other day, I got a handy tip from a guy on the Xbox escalated service number. This was, of course, after getting the goofball treatment from a couple people at the normal number, including one woman who insisted upon transferring me to the Xbox Live division against my protests, which led to me getting “disconnected” while on hold. But the guy at the escalated number was friendly, knowledgeable, and a gamer himself, even hazarding some “unofficial” guesses as to why my game was screwing up.

One possibility, he said, was that recovering my profile a lot might have messed a bit with my Assassin’s Creed save file. And I do recover my profile a lot—just about every time I play on Keith’s or Dan’s machines, which is every couple weeks or so, and then again when I get back home to my own machine.

Now, I don’t know if this is actually corrupting any of my files, but it is a pain in the arse to recover gamer profiles. It requires typing in your gamertag, email address, and password, and if you don’t have a little keyboard attachment, that takes awhile (and shows off your password to all who can follow the cursor). And then it takes a good 5–7 minutes just to load the stupid thing, which doesn’t sound so long, but is kind of a drag when you’re sitting in a room full of people waiting to get their murder on.

One handy solution: Go buy an Xbox memory card, and next time you recover your profile, use that as the storage device. Yes, it’s 20 or 30 bucks out of your pocket, and yes, it fills up a USB slot, but now you can take your profile around with ease and never recover it again. You can still put all your saved games and downloads on your regular hard drive.

Neat trick, huh? Just don’t tell Gizmodo.