I am going back to PC next weekend because I am sick and tired of all the ridiculous maintenance that is required to play Skyrim on Xbox like cleaing up weapons and constantly clearing the game cache just to make it playable and even doing all of that can sometimes be for nothing.

My question, on PC do you have to perform all the maintenance like I mentioned above in order to prevent freezing and stuttering?

I do not plan on having a bunch of mods or anything, just the unofficial patches and maybe an armor mod.

I understand that the capacity of my PC plays a factor here but is that the extent of it, are there issues as far as freezing and stuttering that could potentially make the game unplayable, no matter the quality of your rig, requiring the maintenance that is required on Xbox?

I don't recall ever consciously clearing any cache for Skyrim and I don't know what you mean by cleaning weapons other than their laying around everywhere and not disappearing. They should begone once an enemies re-spawn a few game days later. Maybe you mean the weapons in your house on display being all over the ground when you return. In that case don't display your weapons; believe me its a lot easier not having to worry about that. Steam gets a tad annoying if you don't keep it up to date and if it's not on when you want to play, but other that all that you should find everything else easy to upkeep.

On Xbox the weapons that are dropped by NPC's after they are killed never disappear, I think this is a problem that one of the unofficial patches fixed for PC, as a result these weapons and items will add to the size of your save-file as they build up through Skyrim which results in slower load times and even constant freezing and stuttering as your save file continues to grow in size.

That is just one of many issues on Xbox and PS3 that have been remedied by unofficial patches on PC.

Theoretically you can prevent this problem by picking up all of the fallen weapons and items and replacing them back onto the NPC or in containers. But it just becomes a pain...

You answered my question though by assuming they go away once the enemies re-spawn which indicates that must be the case on PC. It certainly is not the case on Xbox even though 1.9, I believe, claims to have fixed it.