OK, so the Xbox 360 power brick is an easy target and The Incomplete Gamer has taken its fair share of cheap shots. Who cares that it’s big? So your Granny had to move out of the third bedroom and find a place of her own. She’s 80 for crying out loud, she should have moved out of home a long time ago!

Rather than continue to heckle the Xbox 360 power brick from afar, we thought we’d get up close and personal with the big black behemoth and provide our readers with an exclusive, inside-look at the power brick.

(A) Hamster in a wheel. There’s a few different versions of the Hamster in the Wheel (Microsoft Patent pending), depending on your power brick’s country of origin. Believed to provide additional low levels of power, to ensure regular, constant, precise power supply is maintained at all times. This particular component is likely to become as much of an issue on the Xbox 360 mod scene as the last generation Xbox DVD drives were. Now the question won’t be – do you have a Thompson, a Phillips or a Samsung drive? – but whether you have a Mexican hamster or a Chinese one. Word on the street is the Mexican hamsters, not surprisingly, have a habit of sleeping during the afternoon hours. If your 360 is prone to lock-ups after lunch, check power brick for ‘country of origin’ information.

“I thought it was kind of heavy…”

(B) Microsoft’s Operation Trojan Horse. So you probably already know about Microsoft’s grand plan to become the most important part of your lounge. Getting you to buy the Xbox 360 was the easy part. And the way they did the hard-sell on the console’s high definition capabilities almost guarantees you’ll be hooking up this sucker to the shiny new HD-ready TV in your living room. Still, the canny folks at Microsoft are leaving nothing to chance. What if you hook up your new Xbox 360 to the telly in your bedroom or the study? This is when Operation Trojan Horse kicks into gear. Inside each power brick is a very small Microsoft employee. OK, OK, you’ve seen the power brick…he’s probably not that small, I’m just exaggerating again. Anyway, the possibly-very-small Microsoft employee, (let’s call him Trojan, for the sake of keeping this simple) is responsible for ensuring the Xbox 360 does indeed become the central most important component in the lounge room. That’s why, when you woke up the other day, the Xbox 360 was gone from your bedroom and was instead plugged into the HD telly in the lounge room. And you thought your flat mate had been playing with it. It was in fact Trojan, who had slipped, stealth-like out of the power brick, and carried your new shiny console down to the lounge. Trojan has other duties, of course. Who do you think feeds the hamster?

(C) Food stores (See points a & b above). Enough food for the hamster and the very small Microsoft Employee. Note: Naturally, food supplies will vary depending on whether you have a Mexican or Chinese hamster and the exact size of your very small Microsoft employee.

(D) A copy of Microsoft Explorer on Memory Stick Duo (What…the hamster and the tiny Microsoft employee you believe, but you draw the line at Microsoft using a Sony proprietary storage medium – why else did you think the price of memory sticks had fallen so dramatically?) Of course the copy of Microsoft Explorer serves no function at all, old habits die hard and MS just couldn’t resist packing it in with the power brick.

The Incomplete Gamer loves Tivo; unashamedly, unreservedly, absolutely. Even when the hard drive gremlin turns her pretty features a nasty shade of ‘Green Screen of Death’, and she goes into an endless reboot loop, taking three months worth of Scrubs, Law & Order and Wilfred to the Tivo grave.

Tivo’s built a reputation on three features. It boasts, what is quite possibly the world’s most user-friendly interface. Not only is the UI intuitive, it’s incredibly powerful as well. Combine those features with a reputation for reliability and you have one solid Hard Disc Recorder.

For those of us outside the US, the Tivo even comes complete with a certain geeky cachet. Tivo’s not officially sold or supported in Australia, but thanks to the incredible efforts of the local OzTivo community, it’s possible to import a used, Series 1 Tivo, and with a bit of tweaking, and the purchase of an ethernet card and external tuner source, be up and running relatively painlessly. The upside of being an Aussie – the Tivo community provide free weekly TV listings – the raw data that transform the Tivo into an intelligent servant, faithfully recording your favourite telly 24/7. The downside; only the Series 1 Tivo’s will work in Oz. Tivo locked subsequent generation of the units down. The Series 1 was quite the HDD Recorder back in 2001, but today faces off against High Definition competition, both in the form of the Series 3 Tivo as well as other dual-tuner wielding offerings from almost all major AV manufacturers.

In Australia, if you are after a High Def HDD recorder, with a full 7 day a week subscription service then your commercial alternatives are limited. There’s the Dual Tuner High-definition Topfield HDD Recorder or a Media Centre PC, coupled with the ICE TV subscription service. Three drawbacks; it’s a much more expensive proposition. You’ll pay twice as much for the Topfield, or even more for a decent Media Centre PC and then you’ll also have to pay for the monthly TV listing.

Lack of HD not withstanding, the Tivo’s trump card is its geekiness. Remember, there’s no warranty, and no real after sales support. While the Tivo does get a good rap for reliability, these are seven year old units, and basically just pc’s that are always on and always recording. The strong OzTivo community will go out of their way to help you but if you’re considering buying a Tivo, you really need to be prepared to take to it with a torx screwdriver at least once and possibly more often, and therein lies the true joy of Tivo ownership; ripping out the hard drives and re-imaging, replacing a fan that’s finally bit the bullet, not to mention operating on your own PC so as to re-image and test the drives.

Here at Incomplete Gamer HQ, we’ve re-imaged our Tivo’s two 300 gig Samsung hard drives more times than we care to remember. Shortly after its arrival, our Tivo developed a nasty habit of calling time on proceedings after reaching 20 per cent capacity. We originally hoped an upgrade to the latest os would solve the problem, but last week we reluctantly came to the conclusion that one of the two Samsung drives had a bad sector. Testing the drives and completing a low-level format on both drives was the only way forward.

So it was off to Samsung, in search of a HDD utility. If you have Samsung drives then you’ll need a program with the sexy moniker of Hutil. Next up, you’ll need to make a bootable disc. For those that have forgotten or perhaps never made one, you’ll find the instructions here. You can make a CD or floppy disc depending on your PC’s hardware, but we’d recommend a floppy disc, if only because the size of the Dos based Hutil program is very small.

Both drives passed all tests with flying colours (not a bad sector to be found) so there was nothing left to do but run a low level format on both drives. There’s a reason why the program warns you that it may take a while to complete. Try plus twelve hours.

Now the Tivo is back in its rightful place in the Incomplete Gamer Screening Lounge, and for good measure, we’ve swapped the slave and the master drives so even if the hard drive problem’s not fixed, the Tivo should fill to at least 50 per cent capacity (350 hours) without crashing.

Our Tivo’s the Incomplete Gamer’s best friend, just quietly going about it’s business, Muppets from Space one day, Two and a Half Men the next, a Two and a Half Men episode today, and Life on Mars on Sunday. We can safely indulge in the latest video gaming gem, safe in the knowledge that the Tivo has our back.