I recently had purchased the Xenium mod-chip thro an online modchip store. I must say that I am very happy with it. I can have more than one XBE boot-up with it, as with a soft-mod you can only have one. When the Xbox boots up, it loads off the chip, not the harddrive-like the soft-mod. I can even have more than one harddrive. I can fun many services, such as http, ftp, and even ssh servers with this chip. You can customize the boot screen to use different themes.
The Xbox is basically a very torn down version of a computer. The specs are:
- Intel Pentium III 733 Mhz Processor
- 64 meg ati/nvidia video card (depends on which version you have)
- 64 megs of ram
- 8 gig harddrive
- 10/100 LAN NIC card
- DVD ROM
I have upgraded the regular 8 gig harddrive to an 80 gig harddrive. Instead of the regular Xbox boot screen, I load off the XBMC, which is the XBox Media Center. I have components installed on the unit, such as eb browser, network browser, DVD to harddrive copier, play Xbox games off the harddrive, i can even play other gaming systems with emulators.
What is an emulator? They are a piece of software that allows your computer – Xbox to pretend it is a gaming system at which you load a ROM.
What is a ROM? A ROM is a small file that the whole game is loaded into- think of it as the cartridge.
The emulators that are included are Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Nintendo Gameboy, Atari, NeoGeo, Sega Genesis, Playstation, Playstation 2, and even DOS. I can also stream videos that are sourced by my server and by online sites. I can also upload videos to the harddrive to the Xbox harddrive and watch them that way. It has a Mp3 player so you can either upload your music, or stream them off a server or over the internet. So I pretty much have a Home Media Center……Hence is why it is called Xbox Media Center.
So with this being said, I-myself- would rather have have the hard-mod.