Chatting to us all in his weekly podcast podcast, Xbox Live’s personal legend Major Nelson has said that the next system update will make the dashboard fast, and is due out later this year.

“We are making the guide faster,” he said. “The team has done some really good stuff around making performance enhancements,” he added.

“[However,] ‘Performance enhancements’ doesn’t sound right because it sounds like we’re going to give the guide a little blue pill, and we’re not doing that.

“Whatever we call it (and it’s not going to be called the NNXE), but whatever the next version of the dashboard is called, it’s better with a lot of very cool new features. That update will be out later this year,” he said.

Chatting with VG247 today, Rare stated that it is currently considering features to allow users to create their own Avatar kit, saying that user-generation was “simply too big a deal to force into NXE’s launch last year”.

“User-generated content is a huge area that would not have been done any justice if we had tried to cram it into the launch release of this project,” Avatars designer, Dale Murchie said.

“There may be features coming that open up the expressive potential of the Xbox community, but we’re keeping quiet on that for now.”

Microsoft just has just unlocked the first clothing pack for our NXE avatars; a winter themed collection of hat, gloves and the sort, to keep your virtual avatar warm in his/her virtual winter.

Each gender has four new items of clothing to pick from. And best of all? They’re free!

To access them, all you need to do is going to the avatar customisation page. Yup, it really is that simple.

It looks like this is going to be the way avatar clothing is unlocked for the near future, at least until the Avatar Store launches in April next year. What kind of clothing would you like to see?

With the launch of the new NXE and the “avatars” system, some gamers have been frustrated with the system’s limited selection of virtual clothing. We can relax those concerns for now at least; most of it will be free for the foreseeable future.

Talking to German website Dreisechzig, Xbox German product manager Boris Schneider-Johne confirmed that the first few weeks of new Avatar clothes will be available for free, but future ones may come at a price, depending on consumer reaction.

“More costumes will be made available for free in the next weeks” says Schneider-Johne, adding “what’s going to happen as of spring is yet to be announced.”

Real money for virtual clothing? Well, crazier things have happened…

The time is finally here; the NXE is finally live, and ready to download. Simply log into your Xbox Live account, and you will be prompted to update your console.

“It has begun”

You can find some information on what the New Xbox Experience brings to the table here

Once you’ve finally updated, come back here and let us know exactly what you think of the new (and hopefully improved) Xbox experience.

After a day of maintenance, the Xbox.com website has come back online, and has added a number of additions to its functionality in the process; avatars in profiles, and the web-based Marketplace, which is almost complete.

The new web-based Marketplace will allow people logged into their Gamertags to buy stuff directly from the Live Store on their computer, and then download it free of charge to their Xbox 360 whenever they want.

Also, those who already have the NXE installed on their computer and have created an avatar will now see them included on their profile pages on the website.

The New Xbox Experience launched tomorrow, worldwide.

You’d better be, because it’s just around the corner; the New Xbox Experience (NXE) will be a compulsory download for anyone hoping to access Xbox Live after it finally hits down on November 19th.

It’s definately been worth the wait though.

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If you really can’t want until November 19th, and want to mess about with the NXE – the big dashboard update, which completely changes the look of the 360 dashboard, amongst other things – then you may be interested to know it has been leaked onto the vastness of the internet, and is available via download on torrent sites.

This leak means anyone can now download the update, burn it to disc or put it on a memory stick/card that can connect to the 360 via USB, and install the update ahead of time. It will work on a regular console to, no mods necessary.

Be warned though, if you choose to update now you will not be able to connect to Xbox Live until NXE is officially released to the public, meaning no online gaming or Marketplace downloads for quite some time. This does not mean you will be banned from Live though, it just means you are not authorized to connect with NXE installed and will have to wait till MS pushed the big button on November 19th.

If you do install now, all of the offline options will be available to you, such as installing games to the hard disc to improve loading time, and a lovely looking new dashboard. However, it is arguable that most of the best features of NXE are only available when hooked up to live, so maybe it is best to wait.

The Gaming Vault does not condone torrents and piracy, and will not be providing links to the update; we are only providing this information due to the fact that the installation of this firmware doesn’t break any piracy laws or rules.

For those unfortunate few who own a 360 lacking a hard drive, the upcoming New Xbox Experience (NXE) and its required 128 MB storage space poses a bit of a problem. To that end, the big M has come to the rescue with one of two solutions.

By entering your 12 digit console i.d. and serial number here you can see if you’re eligible to purchase a 20 gig hard drive for the paltry sum of $19.99 USD, or Bill Gates is offering you a free, yes, free, 512MB memory card.

Yay for the storage space lacking losers everywhere!