I'm enjoying the interface so far.

With a quick installation, things started out pretty good. It froze up once during installation, no biggie.

The menu screen I thought was great (or perhaps just relative to the blades before it), it felt exactly like Sony's XMB had been flipped to its side. I still don't think it's as intuitive as the XMB nor as thorough with what you can do, but overall, I was very very pleased.

The avatars were ok. My girlfriend and I had a bit of fun creating me, but it pretty much ended after that. I didn't care for it much on the Wii, I don't care for it much now. Although I must say, that the mii's seemed much more customizable to me on the Wii than on the 360.

I am loving the installations, though. I've only tested one game, Lost Odyssey, and it works fantastic. The game was nearly unplayable before with it's ridiculous loading times, but I'm starting to get back into it as its loading times have been greatly reduced.

Netflix - I live in Canada, so this is useless to me. I'm obsessed with blu-ray now though so I'm not sure how much attention I'd even pay.

Overall, I couldn't really ask for much more. They took a very flawed interface and drastically changed it so that it feels like both the PS3 and the Wii's interface. I mean that in the best way. It's great. Plus they added the extra, and awesome, bonus of installing games.

signed up with netflix saw three movies.
didn't play any games last night

 how exactly this netflix work ? and there is a chance for it to come to europe ?

Hey i got a Q guys...

Once you install a game on your HDD, when you put in the game disc for verification, does it have to be the ORIGINAL disc which was copied, or can it be any copy of the game?

Because, my friend has COD4, but his disc has a scratch on it and it doesn't allow him to play the single player portion of the game, only access the multiplayer portion. So I was going to lend him mine, let him install the game, and then simply pop in his copy for authentication purposes.

It might work.

That's somewhat of a rare instance, but assuming both copies are legit, no console chipping is involved, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, as individual copies of games have not been documented anywhere as being keyed to specific consoles.

It's not even clear exactly what function the DVD serves following disc confirmation on an HDD install (removing the disc will stop the game, same as playing from disc). Random checks? Only the data protection load sectors or does it check to see that HDD data matches DVD data periodically?

Only if it's the latter could there be a potential problem.

Still, it doesn't hurt to try (ten minutes of your time).

 Do they have a decent selection of free ones? The only time I ever played with it all the ones I found cost money. I am much more willing now to part with a couple bucks to fix the interface, but would rather have it done at no extra cost if I can.

Thanx for the response... I wasn't sure either about whether or not each copy of the game has its own unique data on the DVD, but I guess we'll give it a shot later and see what happens.

Going off memory, I'll say there are four default themes. Xbox 360 green, spectrum red orange, day pastel blue, night black. I'm sure there will be all sorts of custom themes for sale soon, if not already.

Old themes work, but since there are no blades with multiple pictures, NXE uses the top image, which is cut in half by the default NXE layout. The other theme pictures are visible in the "My Xbox" sub-menus when selected (music, videos, etc.) Naturally, blade color customization is gone.

For Lost Odyssey? You only need to install the Disc that you need. For example, I was on Disc 4 previously and I installed only Disc 4 and it worked fine for me. The install has a huge effect on the load times for LO. It works great!

I love it. So much cleaner and easier to use than the other one. It's cute. Reminds me a lot of the Wii dashboard, which has so far been my favorite but I think NXE tops it.