Gnomie Sean (Higgy76) Higgins writes:

Hey, Chris! I have been talking to people on Xbox Live a lot lately while playing Halo 3 and COD 4 and they have no idea how to use some of the features on the Xbox 360. First, if you don’t have Xbox Live, you need to get it because it adds a whole set of new features to your console and it’s well worth the $50 a year that you pay for it.

1. Turn on background downloading. This will allow your 360 to download everything you have queued up to download while it is in a low power mode. You can do this by going to the system blade and it will be under the shutdown section.

2. You can stream music, pictures, and video from your computer to your Xbox 360. You don’t need to have a media center computer to do this. All you need is Windows Media Player 11 or Zune software and there is other software out there that you can use as well. I use WMP because I think it’s the easiest to use. I have both a Media Center PC and WMP 11; now I never use Media Center on my 360 because everything you can do on Media Center can be done right in the Xbox 360 dashboard. It’s very simple to set up — all you need to do is open up WMP then go to media sharing and allow your PC to share media with your 360.
3. Family settings. If you have a child and you don’t want them spending tons of time playing video games, you can use the family timer on the 360. You can set it up so that you can limit their time on the 360 daily or weekly. If you only want them playing 10 hours a week set it to that and if they go over 10 hours the 360 will shut off.
4. You can set any picture you have on your computer or digital camera as your dashboard background. All you do is connect your camera or connect to your computer then find the picture you want and press “Y” when the picture is highlighted. As of right now you can only use one picture as the background on all the dashboard blades but in the future I’m sure they will update this feature so that you can have different backgrounds on every blade.
5. If you use Windows Live Messenger or MSN Messenger, you can actually sign on to it on your Xbox 360. Of course you need Xbox Live to do this but even if you don’t want to pay for it you can create a free silver account and use this feature. It’s a very nice feature if you’re not near a computer at the moment and you want to get on and chat. You can chat with anyone that is on your friends list whether they’re on their cell phone or computer.