I've actually done quite a bit of research since I just purchased a new plasma TV a few months ago (58" Samsung 650 series)

Plasma's typically still have the clarity advantage over LCD's. They are also better with the color black. Meaning, black is actually black vs. a dark gray.

However, LCD's have come a long way in the past few years. Their picture is very comparable to that of a plasma. They also live longer than a plasma, but plasma TV's have made great strides in this area. My Samsung states it has a lifespan of 100,000 hours (or 11.4 years if you do the math).

The one thing you have to consider is the burn in, although they have included technology to pretty much take care of it (I have never tried to push the limits). If you leave a picture up motionless for a long time you'll notice it starting to burn in. However, newer plasmas come with 'anti-burn' technology, which may include pixel shifting, scrolling white screens, or something else to remove the burn. It works quite well and I have not had a problem yet.

So, I personally believe plasmas are still a superior picture when comparing to LCDs. If you want the best picture, go with a plasma, if you want almost as good a picture and don't want to worry about the burn-in, then go LCD.

However, I love my plasma and am very glad I picked it over a LCD :)

Do you have a warranty with Gamestop? If not, then you'll probably need to send it to Microsoft's repair center. Depending on the issue, hardware failure vs. user breaking the thing) your warranty should still apply and MS will either fix it or send you a new one. Although they'll probably just send you another refurb. I'd give em a call and ask.

Funny Story - well, probably more sad than anything, but I had to chuckle...

So my 360 elite RROD'd a few days ago. I decided that instead of trying to hunt down a box and whatever padding I would need to keep the 360 safe while in transit; I would just head down to the UPS store and have them pack it up.

Here's the funny part... after talking with the guy, who's first words by the way were "Yea, we get a lot of these...", it turns out that they have separate SKU's for a 360 packaging box and the necessary padding material! I mean, they get so many of these in that the packaging has its own bar codes!!!!

So sad, but like I said, I had to chuckle.

For those wondering if an Xbox 360 Elite will last longer or not suffer from the RROD....

My original elite didn't last a year before it RROD'd (back in June of 2008). They sent me a refurb, and now, not even three months later my refurb elite just RROD'd yesterday (08.04.2008).

I find it very lame that Microsoft can't fix this problem. More so now that they require us to package and ship it ourselves (with the label they send us via email... so at least it's still pre-paid). I mean, for crying out loud, if it's over-heating then slap a couple more fans on the thing! At least drill a few more ventilation holes. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

My suggestion is to keep your original packaging that your Xbox 360 came in and use that to send it back.

I agree with a lot of the other posters in here... I wish I didn't love my 360 so much. If that were the case I'd just try and pawn it off on someone (or go with the ritual sledgehammer to console method... always gratifying) and go with another console.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I rarely have time to play games with work/life always getting in the way, so sending off my 360 for a week or two to get fixed, in my mind anyway, is too long. The repairs should be shipping next day Air if you ask me. Or, they should immediately turn around and send you a new one taking your credit card information for collateral.

Anyway... sorry for the griping, but at least I hope the suggestion of keeping your original 360 packaging is useful (since it will eventually RROD)

My two cents.... I've been an avid PC gamer for as long as I can remember for a lot of the same reasons that have been stated on this thread. Ultimate gaming, better performance, downloadable content, component upgrades, etc, etc. However, my girlfriend convinced me to buy a 360 last year and here is what I have to report:

1) When you put a 360 game in the drive it'll run. Unfortunately for PC games (and some 360 games to be completely fair) you typically have to wait for the first patch if not longer to get things to run correctly (i.e. Crysis, Company Of Heroes)

2) My TV at home is much bigger than my monitor, and supports HD. I don't know about everyone else, but I think it looks great on a HD television.

3) You're pretty much guaranteed working 5.1 surround with the 360 with little to no configuration (if you have the sound system to power it)

4) Configuration. I used to love tweaking my PC settings to get the most out of my PC game, but quite frankly I don't have the time anymore. With the 360 you don't have to constantly update all your drivers or mess with your resolution. Same with the sound.

5) I like sitting in my leather recliner vs. my computer chair.

6) Cost. I'm buying a TV and sound system and a bunch of other things for my home theater system anyway, why continue to double-that up and pay a premium for relatively the same (although probably smaller) components for the PC when I can just plug in a 360 and leverage what I already have. It's much cheaper.

If you can, try and have both since agreeably there are some PC games that just won't cut it on a console or are not even available (like RTS's, WoW)

Anyway, my two cents...

I think the warranty is retro'd from purchase date. However, I'm not positive.

I speak from experience on this one. I installed Vista Ultimate 64 about 2-3 months ago. At first, I thought it was really sweet with all the eye candy and the 'newness' factor. However, trust me, it wears off quickly.

I've had nothing but issues with it from a support standpoint. Also, I installed it on a core 2 duo 6800 with 4 gigs of RAM so performance was fine.

However, be prepared for games to run more slowly that with XP. If you're running SLI, be prepared for some games to perform worse than if you were using a single GPU. Also, be prepared to install beta drivers to try and get everything to work. Be prepared to hate UAC and turn it off immediately (quick note, at least from about a month or so ago, I needed to turn UAC back ON in order to get Adobe Reader to install correctly) Be prepared for mysterious IE7 crashes if you use that as a browser.

I like Vista, but it's not mature enough to upgrade to just yet in my opinion. If you do upgrade, a dual-boot with XP is a must.

One last thing, if you use a VPN client for any reason whatsoever (remote into work or something), be prepared for it not to be supported on Vista 64

Conclusion? Only install if you dual-boot with XP. That's what I did after trying to run Vista solo for about a month. It just doesn't have the support (yet) that XP currently does. At least the 64-bit version.

Good luck!

- Creo

TRON 2.0

Dungeon Keeper

NOLF

MAFIA

Max Payne

Starcraft

FreeSpace 2