NXE: Less dash, more bored?
OK, so is this just me or is anyone else finding that the NXE, the 360’s ‘wonderful’ new dashboard upgrade, is becoming rather less wonderful in terms of its speed. One of the major selling points was the fact that the NXE would rectify a lot of the speed issues the old dashboard was becoming bogged down with. And at the start it all seemed to play true to its word, but I’m finding more and more that the NXE takes ages to download images – which it needs to do for pretty much every single image, all the damn time (what was the point of making sure people had a hard-drive or memory card if you’re not going to use it to, I don’t know, store shit?).
In fact the worst is accidentally stopping on the Friends page, which can cause my machine to lock up for a handful of seconds whilst it starts to load avatars — a process I still don’t understand, as it seems to load the avatars you’re least likely to be looking at, i.e. the ones furthest down your friends list, first, and the ones you are actually looking at (the people online) last. Viewing an avatar and then pressing back also tends to lead to a fair amount of temporary freezing.
Don’t get me wrong, I still like the new dashboard plenty and think it’s a big improvement over the old dash, but I can’t help but be a little disappointed every time I’m sat waiting around to perform an action because it’s taking its sweet time over loading something or other. So, is it just me, or has anyone else found that the NXE isn’t proving to be as speedy as it first appeared?
Posted by Ben: February 6th, 2009 under Discussion, Rant, Thoughts.
Tags: 360, Glitch, Microsoft, NXE, Xbox Live
Comments
Comment from Ben @ February 7, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Yeah, the Games Library stuff is one of the worst areas, definitely agreeing there. That is one area that is doubly annoying because it was one that was supposed to be fixed by the whole local database/saving shit to your HDD thing.
Comment from Tri-Devin @ February 8, 2009 at 9:00 am
Yeah, the Game Library is my major gripe too. It took awhile to load sometimes before the update, but at least you could get to some games while waiting for the others to pop up. Now you just sit there waiting 30 seconds to even be able to access the Arcade.
Comment from Soluzar @ February 13, 2009 at 8:05 pm
My dashboard keeps briefly freezing up if I access it from within a game by pressing the Guide Button. It’s a major pain in the ass. I like to send messsages, chat, check achievement details while I’m in a game. That sort of thing. If doing so is going to freeze the system for about five seconds or more, it’s not acceptable.
Comment from Nathan @ February 6, 2009 at 11:08 pm
The friends list is manageable to me, although I almost never wait for the images to load. It doesn’t lock up, so I can quickly scroll through and see who’s online. Since I have a Vista widget that tells me who’s online before I even turn on my 360 (though it’s only about 80% accurate), it’s not that important. My gripe is with the My Games or whatever it’s called section, which lists all your Arcade games. It takes forever for that to load, since I’ve got a lot of games, and it has to reload each time you quit a game and want to pick something new. If they could just find a way to fast-load the Recent Games list, I’d be happy.