My vote is for Live. I'm sure there are ways you can do both, but assuming you don't want the risk of whatever, stay legit and go Live. With Live you get online play for all games with a great matchmaking service. Even if you don't pay for Live and go with a Silver membership, you still get friends, XBL Arcade games, DLC for games, patches, multimedia and system updates. That's a lot to be giving up. Assuming you don't want to whore out a backup of every 360 game released, it might not be worth it in the long run. Also what do you mean when you say a Dashboard update that will render CFW useless? The Dashboard does get some pretty hefty updates now and again (Divx / Xvid support being one of the big draws of the most recent update) and as far as I can tell you be sacrificing the ability to update without a Live connection. May be wrong, but I don't think Microsoft offers ISO-based firmware updates online anymore. PS. Isn't it only the DVD-ROM drives firmware that gets flashed... not the whole system's? Forgive me if I'm confused on that matter. PPS. And yeh, with no Live, no SSF2HDR for you!