cjsimmons.net

Last week I made the jump and got my self a 23″ LCD for my PC finally leaving behind the huge 19″ CRT that I had been using. Since then I have had the urge to connect up my Xbox 360 to it and as it is a better display then the 32″ LCD in my lounge room which on has 1000:1 contrast ratio and can only display 1366×768 resolution while my new Samsung 2333SW can do 20000:1 and full HD 1920×1280. The only downside is that the 2333SW doesn’t have HDMI or component connections, so I’m limited to DVI-D and VGA.

Microsoft supply a VGA cable for the Xbox 360, but it retails for AU$49.95 which I think is pretty pricey, and there are cheaper versions available online through ebay, but then a friend shown me what he has, and it’s cheaper then the cable from Microsoft. The Powerwave Console Cooler & Control Centre. As you can see, there is a VGA plug on there, and that is what I needed. I found one on ebay and got it for just under AU$25.00. As I have all needed cables laying around, that is all I needed to spend.

Once the item arrived, I connected it to my LCD’s VGA port with the VGA cable that came with the LCD, and a RCA to 3.5mm cable plugged the 3.5mm plugged into the line in jack on my PC’s sound card. After enabling the jack in the sound control panel, there was sound and away we went.

The only settings that needed to be changed on the xbox was to select the right screen resolution, 1920×1280, and it looks great!!

All up, I think this is a better solution as it was cheaper, has the 2 fans to help get heat out, and has all the extra ports on the back.

I’m really starting to get sick of all of these problems that Xbox Live is currently having, but come on, it’s been almost 2 weeks and things still haven’t improved. Well, from my end, things haven’t changed. Call of Duty 4 is probably the only game that I’m interested in playing at the moment, along with another 500k people.

I’ve just spent the best part of about 30 minutes trying to join games, invite friends, and even host a private match, and I keep getting errors say that I must have an active network connection. Funny thing is that I’m chatting to a friend over Xbox Live right now.

I don’t know the ins and outs of how things are done with the Xbox Live servers, but I’m sure it couldn’t be too hard to add a few more servers in here and there to cope with demand. Gee, just yesterday they announced that they have sold over 17.7 million consoles and that signups to Xbox Live managed to crash the signup servers.

I know that Microsoft have said that they are going to give a free arcade game to members, but I think that they really need to pull their finger out and get this sorted out ASAP before people start to loose faith and move to another platform.

Anyway, I’m just have a bit of a rant about this whole thing.