Microsoft released their latest update to the Xbox 360 OS on Wednesday. The big changes are integration with Windows Live Messenger, improved achievement notifications, new Marketplace blade, improved support for VGA and improved family security settings.

I have a Hotmail account and have a couple contacts but I rarely use their service. From what I've been told it seems that Hotmail/MSN is very popular across the pond. I can see this as a nice feature to have in cases where your friends are online on the PC and you want to send them an IM get a game setup. That person on the PC can now see if their friends are on the 360 and what they are playing.

The big improvement in my book was better support for VGA. DailyTech has a good article showing the differences. The issues is with the black level over VGA and how over VGA the black level could make the image look a bit washed out. I tried this change last night and saw a difference in the games and movies. Gears is a bit darker but colors stand out a lot more. If you use VGA I recommend this change.

Two small but nice changes are with achievement notifications and displaying the name of the game in the drive. Now when you earn an achievement it shows you the name of the achievement and the gamer score associated with that achievement. It's nice not having to pause the game to see what you just earned. Now when you are in the dashboard you can see the name of the game you have in your DVD drive. If you highlight the game you will see the name and in the ad window you will see the number of achievements you've earned in the game along with the a graphic from the game. This was nice to see so you know without opening the try what's in the console.

PS The new Forza 2 demo is now available. This is a great racing game by Microsoft