I use the MCE part of it a LOT! Hooked up via ethernet to my MCE2005 in another room, I haven’t had a lot of problems other than streaming premium content from Movielink. That’s not ready for primetime in my opinion.

And what the heck is up with not being able to stream internet radio from a PLS? This should be a no-brainer.

I convinced my Dad to get a 360 just for the extender part of it. He’s SO excited about it!

I was disappointed with the noise also, although it is quieter than my old Xbox. I guess it’s difficult to get the price down and put the very best components inside. Quiet but fast DVD drives are hard to find and you need adequate cooling for that PowerPC chip or you’d have more crashing issues. I think people will be coming out with solutions to this. I think I saw someone rig up a liquid cooling setup, and of course you could place it in some sort of cabinet (with good airflow).

Luckily with the arcade, HDTV, and extender technology I am willing to live with some of the drawbacks.

Try the non MCE media extender (can’t remember it’s name), the visualizations are great, although a little too psychedelic. Plus you can play your own music with your games!

The wireless controllers and ability to turn on and off the box from the controller is a 200% improvement. It takes much too much energy to get off the couch and press the button on the old Xbox.

Since it’s sitting in my living room, next to my MCE PC, I have only done basic testing on the extender functionality to see if it works, and it does – but not my digital camcorder (Sanyo) .mp4 files nor does it play back the DVD’s I ripped to hard disk using My Movies.

It’s pretty quiet when in Dashboard/Extender mode, but awfully noisy when playing games. I plan on getting one for the bedroom also, but I worry about keeping one profile – if I take a game up with me, I want to continue playing where I left, not needing different profiles. I’ll either get a memory card with my profile on it, or buy a core version and take the harddisk with me when I move from room to room… Not sure yet.

Getting a male-to-female extension for the component connectors should not be a problem. If you can reach your screen with the cable, you can also consider to hook up the optical audio output on the Xbox-plug to your amp, if that is supported in your configuration.

Anonymous #2, I bought the 360 because it can stream HDTV and the other cheaper extenders cannot. I’m kind of an HDTV nut and when Vista HDTV enabled PCs are out later this year I will need this functionality.

The gaming aspect to the Extender360 though is turning out to be quite cool and fun.