Xbox Avatars Run Free

Microsoft have announced a new service that allows to take your avatar out of it's home and have some fun with it.

This service enables you to import your avatar and place it on a background of your choosing, also you can add a line of text and make your avatar pose. You can then save this image and export it to do with as you please.

However the service is still in its early days and so is a little limited, only a handful of backgrounds are available, only one line of text can be added and only 1 pose is available. Hopefully in the future more will be added to this service.

Anyway Enjoy Free Your Avatar (Be aware service is running a little slowly so be patient)

Hopefully NO Xbox live crash this Xmas

Remember last year come Christmas everyone was excited about their new 360 consoles and couldn't wait to get online and play Gears or FIFA with millions of others. However this was more difficult than they thought when due to the sheer number of new Xbox live users the entire service caved in on itself. As a result over Christmas few if any could connect to live and these problems persisted into the new year resulting in Microsoft having to dish out free arcade games to compensate people.

However all is well this year we hope and Microsoft are better prepared with their newly updated service and new Jasper Consoles. So lets hope it's alls well that ends well. As Aaron Greenberg (Group Product Manager for 360) assures us.

"We've built a lot of infrastructure, a lot of behind the curtain no one seed," he said. "This is something that Microsoft is good at.

"We are well prepared for the type of growth we expect this holiday."

"We will have people standing by, more people on hand than we've ever had before," he said. "Knock on wood we will hopefully not have any issues."