Expert: Octane - 11/26/2008

Question
I bought a sparkling new Xbox360 about a month ago but couldn't be bothered to connect it to Xbox LIVE in that space of time due to the modem being in another room and not being bothered to buy a wireless. Now, as I'm sure you are aware, there is a radical new dashboard for the 360 now out which is available through a supposedly simple update... But of course I wouldn't be here if it were as simple as they say. Basically I brought the modem into the room with the Xbox, went to "Join Xbox LIVE" where it prompted me to download the new update. It then goes into the download screen thing where it fails to download telling me to test my connection ("or if the problem persists go to www.xbox.com/support") so that's exactly what I do. I wander down to Network Settings, Test Connection and everything is grand and dandy until the Xbox LIVE test where it tells me the same message saying that a new update is required and the whole thing starts all over again! It is very frustrating and I am stumped as to what the problem is. Can you help?

Answer
Gday Eogham,

First question does you Xbox 360 have a hard drive?  (I hope you did not fall for the slick MS marketing machine and bought a Arcade Edition?)  If you don't have a hard drive then there is your problem, you need a hard drive to get on Xbox live.

If you have a hard drive how full is it?  You may have to either clean some stuff of your hard drive or worst case reformat you drive and start from scratch.

Your connection sound fine, does your router have any firewalling software in it.  This also may need to be taken off and may be blocking your downloads.

Finally the Xbox NE front end is not really great.  Most of my hard core Xbox buddies hate it and wished they never loaded it on there Xbox.  Personally for me I think it basically X-box Vista, looks really pretty but doesn't really do anything spectacularly new.

Hope this helps.

Octane