Details on the New Xbox Experience: search, hard drive play, alerts, themes, pics

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Here are a couple interesting takeaways from our tour of the New Xbox Experience:

• "There's nothing to announce" right now regarding a keyword search for the Marketplace. Let's hope they either a) add one in or b) drastically improve how we find things

• Playing games from the hard drive will work fine for multi-disc games; in fact, you can pick which discs you want to rip (for example, we're superstitious and we'd only rip odd-numbered discs).
  

• As an example, we were told that Devil May Cry 4 is approximately a 4 or 5GB installation and took about ten minutes.
  

• You'll need to keep the disc in the drive the entire time. This is about speeding up load times (and hey, bonus tip: no more noisy DVD drive while you're playing!)

• The alerts look the same – actually, like the entire interface, they look sharper, cleaner. Oh, and the sound is the same.
  

• Yes, you can still use your gamertag pics and your themes (in fact, they look a lot better now!)

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