Ok so since you all reckon I should point my finger in the direction of the 250gig, that's one problem off my chest. The next thing is that I remember there was a point where people were saying that there are various versions of Xbox, especially since some of them tend to RROD more than others and then there were the ones that were Perfect!!

With the slim version, are they all the same??

I also don't care too much about the HDMI Cable as that is easy for me to get at a decent rate.

I would like to use it as a media player as well, but I'll have it hooked up to my LCD monitor along side my PC.