11/19 is the release date for the "New Xbox Experience" or NXE. As expected, the new update appeared this morning when I powered up the XBox.

[www.xbox.com]

Aside from looking much cooler and more Wii-esque, I guess the biggest improvement for some will be the ability to use Netflix Watch Instantly. You will need to pay a premium of $40/year for this benefit, though, as it is only available to XBox Live Gold members. We are not, but we have been watching Netflix through our media center Mac.

Also, you can now "copy" games to your hard drive, which facilitates faster load times, though you will of course need to have the game disc in the drive to play. Our 20gb hard drive is mostly full already, so I don't expect to be using this feature until we upgrade the hard drive ($60 for 120gb DIY or $135 for drive from MS).

A question about the formatted capacity of that Xbox 360 20GB hard drive -- when new, just how much free space is truly available?

I recently bought a used 20GB X360 drive and found it had only 13.9GB free; the system blade/memory/hard drive options for 'erasing' and 'reinitializing' did nothing to change the free space value. A clusty.com search for 'Xbox 360 20GB hard drive free space' didn't turn up anything useful.

I expected a value somewhat smaller than 20GB ( to allow for decimal->binary base conversion, filesystem metadata and system memory caching ), say in the 18GB range. 13.9GB seems a bit on the small side.

Could you tell me what your drive's free space value is?
Thanks!

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=TC

Oy. Nevermind.

Earlier on, I must have used a different search string than the above ( which gave several useful hits, including this one from IGN.com 12/05/2007 : [xbox360.ign.com] )

Mystery solved, and updates to get and apply ...

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=TC

Well, I downloaded the NXE this morning. Took only about 3 mins. Boots right to the new Avatar setup. Took another 5-10 mins to design my avatar (or you can just select one o the standard ones for 0 setup time).

Here's some points I noticed in my brief use before work...
Very Wii-esque. Nice menu's but slightly confusing at first.

I was looking thru the movies and noticed most of them were rental only (not Netflix...but the regular movie area). The TV shows were still available to 'buy'.

Another 'funny' thing...you can change your Gamercard to reflect the new avatar..for 800 MS points. Wha? Little expensive for something that should be free.

There are several "avatar aware" games in the arcade section. I am not sure but if you already own the previous version it looks like you have to buy it again...not sure.

I bought the "Kelfling" sim game (800 points..or free trial available). Think Guliver's Travels meets Sims. Only got to play for about 20 mins but seems really cool. YMMV.

Overall...I will give it a tentative 7.5 out of 10. I really need to play with it more...but so far, so good.

Jay