It’s always relatively pleasant to realise that you’re going to get something for nothing, even if that something is a new dashboard design that makes the Xbox 360, in our opinion, look a hell of a lot more like the Nintendo Wii. The addition of Avatars seems to be a big thing and yet you would imagine there are bigger issues at stake than how many different styles of lego haircut I can choose from when I make a personalised avatar character that looks nothing like me.

There were a couple of decent bits of news, but I can’t help but feel that the redesign is little more than a complete waste. But maybe that’s just me.

The first bit of good news, for many of us, is that we will be able to rip content from discs to the hard drive. The disc will still need to be inserted in order to play because this helps avoid piracy (ooh arr Jim lad and all that) but it should improve loading times and remove the near apocalyptic cacophony of noise that ruminates from the Xbox 360 when you dare to turn it on and play a game.

The Xbox Live Marketplace will be completely accessible over the Internet on your PC. If said PC is also networked to the same network as your Xbox 360 then, upon purchase, your newly bought content will also start to download to the console.

Netflix support looks to be one of the best additions and if you have content sat in your Netflix queue you can watch it for free on your Xbox 360 console. That’s pretty cool and it will, undoubtedly, lead to a few more subscriptions for Netflix as well so it’s an all round winning situation.

Happy news for those of us over the age of 14 is that with just a slight bit of tinkering you can retain the old dashboard blade and not be forced to use the new look.