I installed and used my Xbox 360 last night
It took me about an hour to get everything set up, but to be honest a large portion of that was me ripping out the old Xbox and my broken DVD player. Then I had to figure out where to put the Xbox. It's placement is constrained by the length of my digital audio cable, which might be all of four feet long. Where the original Xbox has the connection for the audio cable on the far end of the cable that plugs into the back of the Xbox (giving me extra length) the new Xbox plugs the audio cable in right at the back of the unit. This means my Xbox is sitting right up next to my TV for now. The only other setup issue I had was connecting the TV in cables to the right ports on the back of my TV. The cables which come with the 360 have two sections, an audio section with red, yellow, and white connectors (standard) and a video section with red, green, and blue connectors. My TV isn't HD so it doesn't have the blue connector. It turns out that for regular component video display, you need to hook up the red and white audio cables and plug the blue connector into the yellow receptical. It took me two tries to get it right. Not a big deal. I still have something wrong with the sound. I'm wondering if I've specified in the Xbox dashboard a more complex digital output than what my reciever can handle. I've got a DTS 5.1 receiver which worked perfectly with the DVD and the original Xbox. So either I've got something wrong pumping out of the 360 or I've managed to knock some wires loose from the back of the receiver when I was ripping out the DVD player (perfectly possible).
Once I had the hardware set up, I had to configure the Xbox to connect to Xbox Live. My only gripe is that they (Microsoft) continues to insist on using an alphabetic keyboard rather than a QWERTY keyboard for onscreen input. It just takes me longer to find the keys. Other than that the process of hooking up and converting my classic Xbox Live account to an Xbox Live Gold account was entirely seamless.
Next up - connect the Xbox to the Media Center PC so I can stream photos, music, and videos. I connected the two devices over a wireless connection without problems. Photos are flying through the air from my PC to my TV. Excellent. However, the music isn't working. I've got literally thousands of WMA and MP3 files on my PC which I can play through the Media Center UI on the PC, but the Xbox claims not to detect any music. The same thing is true for videos but I actually expected that. I've got some AVI videos I've downloaded, but to play them they have to be converted to a specific type of MPEG video. That's where the
Videora Xbox 30 Video Converter comes in handy. At least, I hope it comes in handy. I've set up my PC to convert one of my movies to MPG format while I'm here at work today. Hopefully when I get home tomorrow I can watch the movie on the TV without having the PC in the same room as the TV. That would be sweet, especially since I've got like a dozen movies compressed into AVI files.
Yesterday, before I even brought the 360 home, I stopped by Best Buy to pick up a game and an extra controller. One game + one wireless controller + tax = $118 @ BestBuy. That's right, $118!!!! Thank goodness I've got some gift cards to Best Buy (Thanks to Kim, Kevin, and Peggy!).
I always like to have 2 controllers (4 is better although rarely used) so friends can play with me whenever they come over. I didn't bother to take it out of the inpenetrable blister pack yet - I'll wait till I have a need. I did notice however that even though there are rechargable battery pack for the 360, it does take regular AA batteries. I've got an old school AA recharger and four or eight rechargable batteries. I'll just use that rather than the play and charge cables. Playing the game without a wired controller was simply awesome. I could walk around, play from the kitchen, whatever I wanted. Awesome. I did find myself moving my controller up and away from myself as I moved my feet out of long habit of using a controller with a cord.
The game I got was Call of Duty - the WWII shooter. Lots of fun in single player mode! I turn out to not be very good, but I'm getting better. I did try a few quick matches on Xbox Live against people I'd never met. The controls are great, the graphics are great. This should be a lot of fun. I also tested to see if some of my original Xbox games would play. The Tom Clancy games do, but none of the other games I wanted to keep did. I'll hang onto StarWars Battle Front hoping that Microsoft will release the emulator for this title, but I'm giving the rest away.
So what's happening to my original Xbox console, the four controllers, and the twenty games I've decided I don't care to try on the 360 (all togther worth at least $1000 on eBay)? Why, I'm giving it all to Brendon, of course. He'll have to buy a subscription to Xbox Live (which comes with the headset he'll need) and we'll have to get a game or two in common, but even without those he's got countless hours of wasted time ahead of him.
-- Matt Ranlett