Just got my xbox about a week ago now going to hook it up to vista from what I understand is possible What can the xbox do once connected to my pc? Also what can be played off the xbox hd? Where to start? What to download? What to read?

This is where you'll want to start:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/windowsmediacenter.htm?WT.svl=nav

The setup of of mce is pretty easy if your xbox is on the LAN. From there you can playback TV, videos, and music from the vmc interface. If you want to get more advanced, you can use the DVRMS toolbox for things like commercial skip and transcode 360 for a greater variety of file types.

My laptop is running XP Media Center Edition but I never use that. I set it up to run both the Windows Media Player and Zune Player servers and use the Windows Media Connect interface, which supports any (or at least many) Universal Plug and Play (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Plug_and_Play) (UPnP) media servers. Once this is set up, to access the media served by my computer (anything I have that the server in use--WMP or Zune Player--knows about), I either go to Media->Video->Computer, Media->Music->Computer or (rarely) Media->Pictures->Computer on the Xbox 360 Dashboard. For music I most often just hit the Guide button (big silver ball with X-box logo) and use the music player interface there. I maintain a few different playlists on my computer of tracks that I like for certain kinds of games and start them playing before I start the game.

I set up the Zune server not just because I use a Zune. It supports streaming of some media types that WMP doesn't--a couple of video formats like MPEG4/AVC. I use the WMP server because I have a small number of WMDRM-licensed pieces of audio and video that the Zune server can't deal with. Some people like alternative freeware UPnP servers like "TVersity (http://tversity.com/)" (which I also run but never use). I switch to the server of my choice by going to System->Computers->Windows-based-PC->Disconnect to dissolve my connection with the current server; the next time that I use Media->xxx->Computer, it will ask me to connect to a server and give me a choice of the ones that it can see on my net. See this (http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemuse/xbox360/digitalmedia/pc.htm) page on Xbox.com for details of setting up the WMP and/or Zune servers.

There's nothing wrong with Windows Media Center and I encourage you to use it if you like it. It just seems like an unnecessary, fluffy, naive-user-oriented interface, and unless you use an MCE PC to watch and record television, there's little advantage to using it. The Dashboard media access UI is perfectly serviceable, though it could use some improvements; I'd love it if I could just point at an item and hit PLAY to start or resume playing it.