Xbox 360 Premium or Elite (not Arcade) - please talk to me about them

[MuffinMclay]

Dh has asked for one of these for his birthday, and I am clueless about such things. Reading reviews on Amazon and play.com it sounds like there are lots of problems with them.

Can anyone tell me:

1. what the difference between the Premium and Elite is (apart from £60). I know he wants to play Xbox live, whatever that is.
2. Are they very noisy and annoying? We have a very open plan house and I don't want something that will keep me awake at night (dh tends to play with these things late at night).
3. Are they prone to overheating?

The more expensive has a hard drive (or a bigger one). Good for saving games, music, demos.

Noisy - the games or the xbox itself? It is noisy to begin with, but you forget about it fairly quick.

Not had over heating problems. There were problems to begin with when the light went all red and possessed and the whole thing died, but don't hear about that now so am assuming they fixed the problem.

Of all the games consoles we have had, the 360 is the one I have liked the most.

ooh plus it restarts your dvd wherever you turn it off

Volume is easy - you just use the TV controller

XBox Live - this connects you to the internet and allows you to play games with people all over world - like internet gaming

The notorious Red Ring of Death - this was a problem but microsoft appear to have sorted it now (allegedly!). If you look on YouTube it is full of people's home videos of their Xboxes with red ring and weeping owners. A cult thing ...

Sorry, some confusion. I meant the noise of the machine whirring etc. Some reviews on Amazon suggested that the fan was very noisy.

Yup, that was the noise I meant - the first few days you look at it and think "bloody hell that's loud, something is dying in there!" - then you forget about it completely.

Xbox live is all of them - you need to subscribe (summat like £40 for the year)

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I'm confused about the various xbox's that are available. The arcade is £100 cheaper than the elite but I cant figure out what the difference really is apart from the size of the drive. My son wants one for for playing games, he is unlikely to download movies or music. Will the arcade be suitable for him ?

Arcade may not have a big enough hard drive to cope with lots of different saved games.

The arcade version is cheaper as no hard drive, you do get a memory card though. If he wants to download demos, make numerous game saves etc he will need a hard driver. If just the odd game save and no downloading of any kind, the arcade version will be fine.