Installing games to the Xbox360 hard drive
There’s a lot of excitement at present surrounding the new Rockstar Games release, Read Dead Redemption, not least amongst my friends at V4 Technical! Having received my copy through from Amazon yesterday, I learned an interesting little tid-bit from Alex Gisby that I cannot quite believe I did not know already.
Apparently, you can install a game to the Xbox360 hard drive, thus speeding up gameplay and most interestingly, the noisy fans and optical disc drives don’t spin constantly so the machine runs almost silently!
How do I install my games?
Well, assuming that you have a fairly decent sized hard drive (i.e. not the original 8GB or the Arcade Edition) then it’s simple and I’d strongly recommend it. All you need to do is insert the game disc into the console and boot up to the Xbox dashboard. Navigate to the game and instead of pressing ‘A’ to load the game, press ‘Y’ instead, this opens the game info screen. Inside of this menu you will see an option to install the game. Obviously, the installation takes a few minutes (Red Dead Redemption probably took around 4 minutes to install) but afterwards you’ll be able to play the game with much quicker loading and without the console fans drowning out the audio entertainment!
P.S. You’ll still need the disc in order to play the game, so this won’t help you to pirate copies of games!