Fair point. Everyone has a different routine/schedule. I like to have an empty bladder and a cool drink before I sit down, so that's a good time for me to have the set fired up.

It would be a nice feature and it's all-but there. There's no technical reason why it can't be done. Same thing with the PS3 not charging through its USB ports when the console is off - there's no actual reason it can't be done.

That's the good thing about being married. You queue something online, then call your wife at home to turn on your xbox, and then five minutes later call her again to turn it off(for background downloading).

You can substitute wife for any other human being/animal that can do that work. YMMV of course!

I've done that before but I usually take shit for it.

Oh wait no, that's not right.

I've gone the wife route as well.

Seems like quite an investment just to get the xbox to download

I'd suspect being married you could come home from work, turn on the xbox and by the time you get to actually watch something and get through listening to her babble for a bit that the entire queue could be downloaded.

oh dear .. my 360 is not seeing any disc in the tray, and all I get is the "open tray" message. I bought a lens cleaner and it did nothing .. I'm wondering if my only alternative here is to wrap a towel around the system and get the RROD in order for it to be repaired. When they replaced systems for RROD it came with a 3-year extension for RROD, right?

No. 3-year RROD from original purchase and 90 day "bumper to bumper" warranty after repair. You can check your warranty status at xbox.com

Surprisingly, the repair total came up to $0.00 when I entered the repair request online .. So, the label was printed and it is on its way.

Good to hear!

Got the NXE update just yesterday. Don't think it's much of a big deal, but I do like the Netflix browsing and will at least try the movie party soon. I like that my games list comes up a lot quicker. It used to take almost a minute to pull up my XBLA titles which sort of defeats the purpose of having them on the HDD instead of being disc-based. Any improvement there is appreciated. Still takes a little while to pull up the prices of things in the Marketplace, which is annoying. Why can't they just list the price when you see the item (the way they do with the Avatar Marketplace now)?

And I know this is an old, old complaint, but it bugs the shit out of me that I have some sweet themes from before the NXE (remember when we got lots of free cool themes from MS -- I do...barely) and now they're totally useless. I'm tired of my 3 or 4 premium themes but I'll be damned if I'll spend $3 on a new one.

I love the new achievement layout. Much easier to browse through and read them all.

I agree that it sucks but do what I do...I get a new free theme every month with a calendar and a hot chick to boot. Nab the free Nissan/Sports Illustrated themes. They aren't very flashy but it a nice change having a new chick in a bikini every month.

I just gave up on my old themes. I am glad I only bought a few and not a bunch since they are worthless now. I just wish they could format the old ones to fit the new way. I had a cool "haunted houses" theme that is now truncated by all the shit covering up the houses.

Married with two small kids = Those themes won't fly here.

I'm married with one small kid.

It's a chick in a bikini. Your wife and kids see more ass at the pool/beach/mall than they will with those themes.

XBL will be down tomorrow for the update

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/xb...pdate-tomorrow

Why? All that talk a year ago about XBL being down so they could make some changes behind the scenes so that they don't have to take XBL offline for future updates was quite the marketing line wasn't it?

This makes no sense why would Live be down tomorrow. Isn't tomorrow the day of the dash update ? Well if it is down lets hope it's not all day.

Makes no sense.

So can we expect at least another outage when they release FB, Twitter and the rest?

Live is down for one day and the sky is falling? Relax people.

Quote from the Eurogamer article:

"Xbox Live will be down tomorrow whilst the summer dashboard update is applied."

Sounds like it shouldn't be down for the whole day, only as long as it takes to apply the update. Granted, this is Xbox Live, so expect the worst and hope for the best.

It was down Friday night too.

I don't see how it doesn't need to be down for the people in the 'beta,' but when it officially launches it needs to be taken offline.

because of the slew of people trying to get on - this way they can have rolling brownouts where it's down for some and not for others yet cover their ass by saying it'll be down rather than have the crash when everyone wants to upgrade?

Well in that case, since they update your console on their end, why not just do 250k-500k a day for 2-3 weeks and not have an official 'launch' if their system can't handle everyone at once?

I haven't seen anything in MajorNelson. So, is there any official announcement anywhere?

And I just can't see them announcing an outage and then letting some people in. What they can do, and I expect them to do that, is to create a queue. Not all the people will turn on their Xbox at the same time tomorrow to get the update. So let's say 100K people turn on their Xbox at the same time, they can make a queue so 10K people receive the notification that the update is available, then wait another 5 minutes send the message to another 10K, something like that. I have the update and I downloaded it in less than 40 seconds. I have 13 mbps down but still, it shouldn't take a lot of time.

Shouldn't be an issue - but we all know what happens when we assume Live will be OK