by April 2nd 2008 10:37 PM CDT1 Comments
As many of you well know, Xbox Live has been having issues on and off lately, and Microsoft is not allowed to discuss them anymore because some intelligent folk decided to sue them. Great. If you're like me, that means that getting online lately has been hard, if not somewhere between unlikely and impossible. But there is an easy solution, so long as you were able to get online already.
Manual override is the key element to just about every fix. See, the 360 is basically a computer, just with different software. It has software to detect an internet connection and all the things required to get online, such as finding (or what's more often referred to as 'discovering') your IP address, hostmask, DNS server and a few other goodies you probably haven't heard of.
Chances are right now, even if you don't have problems getting online, it does take a minute or two for your 360 to log you in. This occurs because the 360 doesn't go into standby like the PS3 and Wii; it shuts off entirely, cutting off the internet circulation, if you will. So the 360 has to relocate where it is, since it doesn't actually know. The automatic detection works fine most of the time, but the issues with Xbox Live, and possibly your specific connection type, may make things go awry.
The simple solution is as follows: grab a laptop or any computer you have and plug it into the ethernet cable you use for the 360. Let it automatically detect everything and wait for it to get online. If it doesn't get online, chances are you don't actually have a connection going to that outlet, your cable is broken or your settings on the computer are incorrect. Should any of those be the case, check your cable first, then the outlet and finally your computer. Most people check the hardware first, but you should know that more often then not the software is running fine when things go awry. If a reboot doesn't fix it, check the hardware.
Once it's online (if you're using the computer), on the bottom right there will be a computer icon which, when hovering th
e mouse over it, will display some information about your connection. Double click on it and the "Local Area Connection Status" on any Windows machine and window will pop up. On the top, click the "Support" tab, then the details button. If you're using a Mac, then I expect you'll already know your way around it.
That list of information is all you need. Once you have it up, plug the ethernet cable back into the 360 but leave the computer running. You'll need that info.
Turn on your 360 and go to the system blade (the very last one), then internet connection settings and click A. Click on "Edit Settings". In the basic settings tab, it should give you a list of numbers that should look similar to your settings on the computer. Click on it, set it to manual setup and plug the numbers in. Hope you have a keyboard to use, because chugging away at those numbers with the 360 controller isn't the best way to have fun.
Once you finish typing it all up, test your connection and see how much faster it goes. Results may vary, but if you put the information in correctly, it should go almost instantaneously. That's because instead of trying every port, or every possible address, gateway, and everything else, it goes just to the one you picked. The right one.
If you're using a wireless network, then the same thing applies, but you probably shouldn't be having an issue if you are.
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