Mass-effect – When does the romance occur

Firstly for an initial point of no return - as soon as you get access to the Sirta vendor in the Hospital ward buy a/the present/s, completing missions removes them quickly before you know their value.

Secondly before beginning Priority: Tuchanka you should finish off as many sidequests as you can, since completing it renders some sidequests as failed. Don't panic about having some remaining in your journal however, a few don't have their locations unlocked for retrieving quest items until later.

Thirdly Priority: Cerberus Headquarters is the point of no return for the rest of the sidequests. You can still use the onboard vendors on the normandy to purchase goods, but because of the price markup on the ship it's better to visit them directly for whatever you need before commencing this mission as well.

I did some experimentation this evening before and after installing the game to the hard drive:

• Loading to title: unchanged. Both times it took about 54 seconds to get to the main menu.
• Loading a save from the main menu: 8 seconds (25%) faster when installed.
• Reloading the same save: 2 seconds (10%) faster when installed.
• Elevators in the Citadel: 5 seconds (25%) faster when installed.

You're not going to save a heck of a lot of time per-load, but if you plan to invest a good amount of time in the game, it's probably worth it to install to the disk.