Guidence Needed For General Xbox 360 Version Info

if you're using it strictly as a WMC extender, get the cheapest one you can find. it already comes with a composite cable.

if you already have a WMC remote, you can use that with your 360. or pick up a cheap IR remote. But yes, you can use the game controller as the remote.

Netflix is not an option unless you pick up an Xbox Live Gold membership.

personally, I would not want to get a used 360 off of Ebay. You don't know its history. You don't know whether it's been banned. what 360 revision it is (you want a 360 with a Jasper motherboard/chipset or newer). you don't know the usage or repair history.

360 consoles were finally reliable with the Jasper revision.

"Jasper" (released late August or early September 2008) used both a 65 nm CPU and GPU, as well as 256 MB or 512 MB of on-board flash memory. (This was to help run a then-recent Dashboard update. Without the addition of this internal memory, a hard drive or memory card is required.) The "Jasper" revision required even less power, and so the power supply was also reduced to 150 watts.

the original 360 used a 203W power supply and had 90 nm CPU and 90 nm GPU.

If you had an original 360 way back in the day and it RROD (red ring of death), you sent it in to be repaired free of charge but that basically meant they shipped you a refurbished 360 rather than your actual 360 but it was a 360 of the same model type. In other words, you would get back a 360 that had the same probabilities of having a RROD in the future. So if you sent in a Xenon 360, you wouldn't get back a Jasper 360.

It wasn't until June of 2008 when Microsoft created the Opus motherboard that would replace your original 360 MB and thus be more reliable. So if you sent in an old 360, you would get back a refurb with an Opus MB rather than the Xenon, Zephyr or Falcon MB's.

So I wouldn't even consider a 360 that wasn't late 2008 or newer.

But that doesn't deal with the possibility that the 360 was modded in some way. A lot of gamers sell their console when their modded system was detected and banned. They don't ban the account, they ban the console.