It comes with a 20Gig drive - that is half full when you get it. It has about 3 Gig of demos plus 7 Gig of reserved space. Why they needed to reserve space you may never use, only they know. I tried out some of the demo games - most of them indicate that an update is available and you had better accept it... or else. I was thinking about getting a larger drive as it is clear this one will fill up pretty fast, but it looks like I'd have to swap the plastic cases on them to preserve the custom colors of the system. Not that pea-soup green is my favorite color (it does beat out gloss black or gloss white), but the orange/gold trim on the drive is classy.

     I tested some of my original Xbox games on it. Most of them don't play. It doesn't even try to play them - it just refuses. I have "Dead or Alive 3". As far as I know there is no way to get the costume update onto the drive since it comes on a demo disc that is not supported. The upside is that this game is upconverted to 720P letterbox format. On the other hand, "Soul Calibur 2" plays in 720p 4:3 format just like on the original Xbox. "Bloodrayne 2" is supported, but not the first one, which IMHO is the better one. When I count them, less than half of the original games I have play on it.

     I connected a USB drive to it. You can read from it, but not write anything useful to it. I played one MP3 song on it. I let it play while I did other things. I thought it would stop when the song ended - wrong! It kept playing it over and over even when I started a game.

     You can download all kinds of game demos and promos. It lets you queue up to six of them. That's a rather arbitrary number. I'd like put a dozen or more in the list before I head to bed and let them all come down overnight. You can have the downloads continue after you turn the Xbox 360 off. What is their definition of "power off"? It looks like everything is still running except for the screen and controller.

     It has a neat controller. They moved the black and white buttons to the shoulders like the Playstation ones. I push the Xbox logo button to turn it on - the original controllers had that huge logo that just took up space. When the system "powers down", the controller turns off by itself (or after some timeout of inactivity).

     I made the mistake of unplugging the system the first night and had to re-acquire my Xbox Live account. While Xbox Live was an add-on for the original one, this one revolves around it. Most of the menus are for Xbox Live. Playing anything other than game discs is "hide and seek". Playing music is one menu, playing demo games is on another, and playing videos or movies is someplace else. The demo games are also sorted into arcade and disc demos so you need to know which is which to play them. new update: they fixed that - all the games are in one spot now - I like that

     When you pick a game demo, you get the option to run or delete it, but you have to go into the drive menu to move or copy it. I guess you can only do that with official memory cards as it didn't recognize my 120GB USB drive as a valid destination.

     I tired to play an MP4 video of a commercial I downloaded. First I had to download an update to play AAC and MP4 media, then it told me it wouldn't play anyway. So many updates for such a new product. It's not like I bought a white one that could have been sitting on the store shelf for a year.A new update: they added .avi capability, but I had to download an update that it told me I had already downloaded.:

     It comes with the a custom green controller and wired headset. Why not the new Halo 3 Spartan controller and the new wireless headset in gold and green? At least it included a composite/component cable instead of those stupid "advanced" boxes the original one required to get anything other than composite video.

     I've read online about all the people taking off from work/school to play "Halo 3". I'm waiting for the weekend. I played the first level of the original Halo to get used to the controls again. new update: I played "Halo 3" until I got to a point that I couldn't get past. I'm playing "Mass Effect" now which I like a lot more.

last update: December 17th, 2007 by Harry Dodgson