Advice on buying an Xbox 360.

[Godzilla]

My son wants to buy a S/H Xbox 360 and i need a few things explained for him.

Which drives are desirable, and which are to be avoided?

Can a modded box play xbox live and not be banned? Is there a chip for this?

Does it need to be chipped to play ntsc and burnt games like the old one did?

What are the going prices for second hand xboxes 20, 60 and 120gig on average please?

Sorry for the newbie questions, but we haven't been following developments since the old xbox's.

[alphredo]

samsung, hitachi and benq drives are moddable however hitachi drives are touchy about which media they will read ( verbatim only pretty much ).
lite-on drives cannot be modded , only swapped out for one of the previously mentioned ones so avoid lite-on if possible, you can tell if its a lite-on by looking through a little hole under the faceplate.
yellow wires = lite-on
white wires = benq
red wires = samsung
cover thingy so u cant see any wires = hitachi

or you can look at the drives trey as seen here, but benq and lite-on have the same trey so youll need to look at the wires.

current firmware is iextreme 1.4 which is stealth firmware allowing you too play backups on live undetected, people will say its still a risk but i havent been banned and play on live nightly so its your decision too make if you want too risk it or not.

mod chips do the same thing as a firmware flash and neither a flash or a chip will allow you too avoid region locking, only play burnt media.

as for second hand prices , they vary... i think a 20gb pro pack is worth around $350 second hand and modded.

[Woodstock]

make sure ya get 360 with 20GB+ HD as u can copy the games to HD and play them .. saves wear on dvd-rom and less noise ...

[Godzilla]

Thanks guys.

[sniper]

make sure ya get 360 with 20GB+ HD as u can copy the games to HD and play them .. saves wear on dvd-rom and less noise ...

wasn't aware this could be done ?? Can you explain how to do this on my modded 360 ??

[Woodstock]

ya need run update that floating around .. new dashboard .. prewarned LIVE does not work until offically released ..on 19 th ... search forum I posted link in the thread ..

[RHCP]

What's the media playback functionality like on these things? As i was going to get a popcorn hour machine, but if the xbox can play most avi/divx files from shared directories on a media server, then i wont bother with the popcorn hour.

Cheers, RHCP.