This year mum and I did our bit to stimulate the economy by purchasing two Xbox 360s as Christmas presents: one from me to my brother and nephews, and one from mum to dad.

Dad's Xbox LIVE Avatar Rather than paying around $400 for a pro console with a 60GB drive, we opted for the Arcade SKU without the hard drive. Picked them up from Dick Smith Electronics for $238 apiece, which is still a great price. I knew that I didn’t want them to run the NXE off a memory unit, so I did plan to pick up a hard drive for them eventually, but I had no idea that hard drives were so expensive! $199 for a 120GB drive (with neither Ben nor dad will ever use since we don’t have a video marketplace in Australia)! That’s nearly the entire cost of the Xbox just for a hard drive!

Then I remembered that Microsoft have a special offer going at the moment: The Xbox 360 Storage Upgrade offer. You type in your 360’s serial number and console ID, and you can pick up a refurbished 20GB hard drive for only $35! I unpacked both consoles before Christmas and did just that, and yesterday I received the two hard drives.

Now, when we first set dad’s 360 up at his place on Christmas day I wanted to get his Xbox LIVE gamertag going straight away. I soon discovered, however, that you can’t join Xbox LIVE until you’ve pulled down the dashboard upgrade! Begrudgingly I did just that, storing the NXE on their 512MB memory unit. It all went swimmingly but I was concerned that when the hard drives arrived there’d be some problem when I unplugged the memory unit.

So yesterday I drove round there and gave it a whirl. I followed these steps:

  1. Turned off the 360, plugged in the hard drive, and turned it back on
  2. Moved his gamer profile and any saved data from the memory unit to the hard drive
  3. Turned off the 360, unplugged the MU and turned it back on, fingers crossed.

As it turns out, the 360 must store a kind of “kernel” for the dashboard upgrade internally, because it booted up just fine and prompted me to “apply” the update. That involved re-downloading, which took about 20 minutes. Once that was done, everything was back to normal, except without the need for a memory unit!

Having done that I introduced mum and dad to the joys of Hexic HD and Zuma, and I can foresee them getting right into those sorts of games in the future.