Ok, so this is more of a recreational post, but we can have one of these once in awhile, right?  I, like many others, downloaded the much awaited fall XBOX update, dubbed the ‘NXE’, or New XBOX Experience.  I don’t care much for the new avatar system, I could take it or leave it, but it’s not too bad and not really overbearing and ‘in your face’ aside from actually forcing you to create one. If I had to like one thing about it, it’s the fact that my gamer pic is now of the avatar looking heroically upward and to the right, rather than the blue snail that I so entusiastically chose from the anemic default options of the older system.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it, but I like the new interface much better than the blades. It opens the functionality up. For example, the ‘Iron Man’ rental from the video marketplace shows up and is visible without being out of place or looking like it’s in a designated ad spot that we’ve all been trained to ignore, whereas before I don’t think most people even realized they could rent movies.

I look forward to trying out the Netflix streaming, too.  I may update this post with my experiences on that, since it seems that most people have been looking forward to that feature the most.

I did run into a bit of a bug, I had previously had it connected to my linux server for streaming my movie collection. It still works, but it had me download the codecs package again, which there was some weirdness with. It acted as though I needed to download it, I got prompted to install it, then it showed it was installed but did not work. Then I went into the prompt to install again, where it was checked as downloaded and installed already. I selected it, and got ‘to use this feature, please launch the game that it was intended for’, or something to that effect. Instead, I opted to reinstall, and that time it actually showed it downloading, installing, and then it worked.

In all, though, I’d say this refresh was a good move.