should i buy a chipped XBOX 360?

Chipped consoles and games get picked off XBL servers fast. Really, really friggin fast. You will be able to play for awhile, but if the guy who chipped it bought a POS chip, you will get thrown off LIVE quick. Also, there will be no, I repeat NO warranty, even against RROD, they will take your Xbox, see the chip and throw it straight in the trash and may bring a legal course of action against you.

MMMM im sure that if an xbox is chipped then you are playing pot luck whether or not your console gets banned from xbox live making it useless, but you can get your drive flashed making it capable to read more disks than just the xbox360 standards and you can play the copied/backup games online (make sure that if you have the drive flashed that when you buy copies/backups they are 'STEALTH PATCHED' flashing costs around 45 quid and id recommend this option rather than getting it chipped,

ps (unrelated comment) if experiencing rrod dont throw away get on ebay and get the Xclamp kit £3 delivered, iv fixed 7 so far.

I wouldn't buy it. Although being a god for a week is fun, this isn't a computer, it doesn't last forever. It took my friend 3 days to get booted from live with a chipped Xbox, and now he can only play offline, sure he can jump to the top of maps...alone.

If you get your Xbox modded, xbox live will still work, and the games will still work with xbox live. The games will have everything the real ones do. The problem is that with games for modded xboxes, they generally come out earlier than the real release date, due to getting them illegally. So if you're going to play them early, unhook from xbox live, and play offline, or wait till other people have the real game to play on xbox live.