Eurogamer writes: "For a dashboard upgrade supposedly aimed at attracting the 'casual' audience, New Xbox Experience actually has a lot of love for the core 360 enthusiast gamer. The Party mode craved by Live users has been incorporated, tweaks long asked for have been made to the VGA/HDMI video outputs, but perhaps most surprisingly of all, Microsoft has allowed gamers to optionally install their games to hard disk. This is - potentially - a very good thing.
Eurogamer has never been a massive fan of the mandatory installations required on many PlayStation 3 releases. It has a fundamental impact on the 'plug and play' nature of console gaming, especially when you can be sitting about for up to 25 minutes waiting to play your brand new release. It also forces you to manage hard disk space efficiently, especially if you have a lower-capacity drive in your PS3. There's also the fact that once you've deleted your game install, as you inevitably will in order to get more mandatory installs onto your hard disk, you'll need to wait another 25 minutes if, for example, you fancy a one-off late-night blast on Devil May Cry 4 sometime in the future."
the point in installs. glad they are optional. the games seem to perform and load just as fast--in some cases it took LONGER with the install. i dont think i will be installing anything, wasting good game time, just to shave a second here, a second there---or in some cases, adding a few seconds.
This is probably the ONLY article that seems to do a good job of explaining what the 360s "install" actually is, that the 360s "install" =/= PS3 Installs and what the real improvements and its affects on actual gameplay vs start up are
Hopefully the people that got confused with the crappy articles regarding the installs will read this to get the whole deal