Computer Tutorials

This tutorial will show you how to create a Silver membership on Xbox Live from scratch, a few questions are answered before hand:

Do I need Windows Live ID?
Yes, but you can create one in the process (see tutorial).

Does my Xbox need to have Internet?
Yes.

Do I need a Hard Drive or Memory Unit?
Yes, either will do.

I have a gold account using a credit card how do I get back to silver?
Phone Xbox and have them remove the credit card.

If you have Xbox Live Gold using the Gold subscription cards, once your time has run out your account will revert back to Silver automatically.

Lets begin the tutorial, set up your Xbox make sure there is a memory device in place and that is has Internet access.

OK, Starting on the Xbox Live blade of the dashboard go down and select Join Xbox Live.
A side window will pop out, again select Join Xbox Live.

You may be asked here to exit your session, if you are select Yes.

Welcome to Xbox Live screen should appear Select Continue.

Enter a Gamertag (a name you will be known as online, nickname) once you have entered one press Start.
Xbox will now check if that name is in use on either Xbox Live, Windows Live and Zune, if its all ready in use will have to create a different name and repeat until successful or use the Show More Gamertags.

Once you have found a name that is available you will be sent do the windows live ID screen, if you all ready have a Windows Live ID you will select Yes, I do if however you don’t then you can select No, Create one and follow the instructions.
For this tutorials sake we are selecting Yes, I do.

Now you will be required to enter your E-mail address and password for that account, Once you are done select sign in.
If there is a problem you will be asked to repeat the process until the email and password are correct.

Terms of use and privacy statement, Read it then select Accept if you agree, you cannot continue with out selecting Accept.

Now you will be asked to select a membership option for this account, and as the title of this tutorial says we are going to select Xbox Live Silver Membership £0.00, You will then be asked if you are sure you only want silver Select Keep Silver.

At this point you may be eligible for a Free Trial Membership of 1 month to Xbox Live Gold.. Not sure if everyone gets this however I did at this point. I selected Continue

Now you are asked for your Address, enter the details and select Next.

You are now asked to pic a Gamer Picture.. (this can be changed a later date if you decide to).

Select your Gaming Zone, one of four choices Recreation, Pro, Family or Underground.

Xbox Marketing asks you if you would like to receive information on updates, demos etc. I’m not going to tell you which one to pic here that’s your choice. Then you are also asked if you would like to share your information with third party partners of xbox, I would say select No here but again its your choice.

Your Xbox Live account is now being created, if you did not get the option for a free 1 month then once you Select Done you will have a silver account, however for those of you that had the 1 month option you can now go and play some online games.

* Browse the Xbox Live Marketplace
* Access Xbox Live Marketplace downloads and Xbox Live Arcade games (You will still need to pay for the content if its not free)
* Create Gamertags and Gamer Profiles
* Use voice and text messaging
* Download new levels for games
* Watch (but not play) multiplayer online gaming
* Have dates associated with your achievements if you where signed in when you achieved them.

That’s about it for this tutorial, I’m going to go play some Halo 3 now as always any questions feel free to comment below.

This happened to me the other day and I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out
why I couldn’t get to account management on my xbox.

The Issue:
The credit card you use for xbox live has expired so your Xbox Live account has
been suspended which means you can no longer sign into xbox live. If you can not
sign into your account on the xbox you can not access Account management.

It’s a rather stupid error on Microsoft’s part if i do say so myself, they tell you
to sort the credit card information out but you are unable to without signing into
your account!! they really need to default your account back to a Silver account
when your credit card runs out so you can still sign in and access account
management.

Ok so how do i fix it?

Go to http://www.xbox.com/

Sign in with your Xbox live Email and Password

Once you have signed in, click on your Gamer Tag

Click on Manage Profile

Click Contact and Billing Information

Click My Billing Information

There you go from this page you can now access your credit card information, you
can now enter the details of your new card/account and have xbox live back up in no
time at all.
Once you have entered all the details of a new card your Xbox Live will be active
again and you’ll once again be able to sign in to your account and play!

I hope this helped you save some time and stress, it really had me stressing all I
wanted to do was have a few games of Halo 3.

Adam Nugent

This is more of an add-on tutorial linked to my Xbox Live ICS tutorial, as this has been one of the errors received.

So you was trying to set up ICS and suddently you got this error message in your face, “An error occurred while Internet Connection Sharing was being enabled” Well Don’t worry it’s not the end of the road yet, you will recevie this error message if one or more of the services required for ICS are not running which in most cases can be easily fixed by finding the services and turning them on.

First Lets find where the services are:

Click Start then Click Run Or Hold down the Windows Key and press ‘R’.
Now type in Services.msc. and click Ok.
You will now be presented with the Services Window.

This is where you can stop and start services now listed below are all the services that are required to be running for ICS to work.

Application Layer Gateway Service
Network Connections
Network Location Awareness (NLA)
Plug And Play
Remote Access Auto Connection Manager
Remote Access Connection Manager
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Telephony

Now you need to scroll though the list of services in the window and find all them services listed above and ensure that they are turned on. To do this all you have to do is double click on the Service and in the properties window that pops up Click Start then Ok.

There is also a drop down box on the poperties windows where you can change the services from Manual to Automatic, Just be sure to make a few little notes of what services you changed and please dont turn any off unless you know what it does because this could cause you more problems then its worth.

Now you NEED to restart your computer at this point and try ICS again, If you are still receiving the error an error occurred while Internet connection sharing was being enabled, there is one more thing you should check.

Go back into Services.msc and on each of the services I mentioned one at a time and double click.
This will bring up the properties for that service.
Click on the Log On tab.
Make sure This Account is selected.
Check to see if the service is enabled on your hardware profile.
If this service is disabled click enable.
Do this for all the services mentioned above then restart your computer again and retry.

Hopefully this will solve the Issue.

Adam Nugent

Tutorial is in the bottom half of the post, if you want to skip my story

This post is an update on my last Xbox 360 post, where I talked about using a Bridged connection to get connected to Xbox Live..  Well me being me I had to keep trying to used what I was told I could, that being ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) because before this wouldn’t work for me.

While I was using the bridged connection I kept loosing Internet over and over again and the only thing I was able to pin this down to was the bridged connection.. as this was the only change I had made to my Internet in the time frame.. anyway that’s a long story and it turns out that NTL aka Virgin Media where the cause of my issue with intermittent Internet.

Once all this was sorted and my Internet was fine and I found out what my problem was.. and you are going to laugh your arse off, nether the less I’m going to let you in on my what was causing my stress… wait for it… I feel so embarrassed about it!

I have a Mac address on the Xbox a manual one! That I put in for (cough) some reason… and because of this I was unable to use ICS so the first, very first thing! you should do if you are having issues setting up ICS with your Xbox I would insist that you check that all your Xbox network settings are set to Automatic or default meaning you don’t change a thing from the basic settings and then try setting up your ICS and everything should be ok like it is for me now.

Lets get you connected then using ICS rather then Bridged.

First Navigate to:
Start > Network > Network and Sharing Center > Manage Network Connections.

Now that you are in network connections make sure that there are only two icons in here that being 1. Wireless 2. Local Area Connection, these are the only two connections that should be there

Now go into the properties of the wireless connection and make sure you have unchecked “allow other network users to connect thought this computers Internet connection” Uncheck the box and click OK

Now reboot the computer

when you are up and running again go back to:
Start > Network > Network and Sharing Center > Manage Network Connections.

Enable Local area connection if its not all ready, go to the properties and double click “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)” with will open the properties, ensure that “Obtain an IP address automatically” and “Obtain DNS server address automatically” are both checked! then click OK.

Now go to the properties of the wireless connection, on the sharing tab check both boxes and click OK.

go to the properties of the local area connection once again and open up 4 (TCP/IPv4) again and you should now see that’s its changed to
ip 192.168.0.1
subnet 255.255.255.0
default gateway -empty-

and that use the following DNS server addresses is now checked.

This should now allow you to connect to xbox live with via the Ethernet cable from your laptop to your xbox.

If anything above is not what I’ve said then recheck/redo until you get the same results because they are what will get you connected.

Important: You do not need a Crossover cable, a normal run of the mill ethernet cable will work fine. I only say this because I’ve come over alot of people saying you need a crossover cable when you don’t, I’m not sure if this was the case with older Xbox’s but I can asure you its not the case with a new Xbox 360.

How to Fix “An error occurred while Internet Connection Sharing was being enabled”

If you do encounter any issues while trying to set up either an ICS or Bridged connection let me know and I’ll be happy to help you if I can (Time permitting).

Adam Nugent

I am writing this tutorial because I had about 5 hours of stress while trying to do this for the first time! yes, I’m serious and it really got to me. Hopefully this tutorial will stop other people from facing the same fate as I did.

You want to connect to your Xbox Live on your Xbox 360 but you don’t have a wireless adapter or your modem is not within reach, so your going to need to share you Internet connect on your computer of laptop.

My laptop is running Windows Vista Home Premium and has a wireless connection to my router.. and that’s what I used to connect my Xbox 360 to Xbox Live and below you will find out how I managed to do this and it was not using ICS - Internet Connection Sharing because for some odd reason that would not work with Vista for me! The way that I managed to get everything working was to bridge my LAN with my Wireless… Below are the steps to take.

1. Setup your Xbox 360 and your Laptop/PC
2. Plug the Ethernet cable into your Xbox 360 and your Laptop/PC
3. Make sure your Computer is connected to the Internet
4. On your computer follow these steps:

1. Click on Start to bring up your Start Menu
2. Type in to the search bar network sh
3. Now at the top you should see Network and Sharing Center, Click on this
4. On the left hand side click on Manage Network Connections
5. Highlight both your Wireless connection and your Local Area Connection (LAN)
6. Right Click on one of them (Note: both should be highlighted at this point)
7. Select Bridge Connections

Now the rest it quite simple its just a case of confirming everything and agreeing to anything windows asks you to do once you have done this make sure you are still connected to the Internet on your Laptop/PC as it did kick me off a few times to start with, don’t worry about this just reset your Internet.

Once you have Internet on your computer go onto your Xbox 360 and test your connection. you should now be able to acquire an IP and DNS if not then repeat this process until you succeed or try something else because this was the last method I tried and the one that happened to work for me tho other methods my work equally as well for you!

I hope this helped and I hope you are Connected to Xbox Live now!

If you are having problems using a bridged connection you may need to use and ICS connection instead, Lucky for you I have a tutorial on this to Connect Xbox Using ICS