When the 360 launched and had the much cleaner, easier to navigate and understand "blades" menu, the 360 would boot to usable in about a minute or less... now my 360s with Kinect (with all the "updates") takes something like 5 minutes to become usable.

The hell is the 360 loading that can take this long, and how is this a better user experience?

whens the last time you wiped your hard drive or cleared your cache? that seems to help most people with speed issues..

The blades were slow, lurid, and couldn't handle a fraction of of the marketplace content that's currently available.

My 360 boots in twelve–fifteen seconds. If yours takes five minutes, clearing your hard drive cache may help. Also, due to the amount of online content that caches to the console it will take longer to boot to the dashboard if its Internet bandwidth is choked.

Mine probably takes a minute or two, with the spinning 'loading' circle. Definitely used to be shorter. I have about 50 gigs free on my 250gb, so there's a good amount of stuff on there. I have cleared the cache recently, but that did not seem to help.

I've never cleared the cache, how does one go about doing that?

Just have a flick through your harddrive memory in the settings, delete all the inevitable little bits of rubbish that you really don't need any more. If you have a big harddrive it's easier for this sort of stuff to build up, because you don't need to worry about running out of space. I only have 32gb so I need to trim it down regularly.

The 360 has never had a lightning quick menu system, but it's definitely got at least a little bit quicker since the blades. 5 minutes is far too long, sounds like it's getting bogged down.

its under system setting, memory, clear cache or something like that.

@aspaceinvader: I'm going to give that a try.

Clearing cache doesn't do shit.