XBox Live: On the Road

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Over the holidays, I went back home to visit my family. My little sister has an XBox, Halo 2, and DSL, as well as a free trial to XBox Live that came with Halo 2. However, the XBox is located in a part of the house that doesn't have any phone jacks nearby, so she'd never taken the time to hook it up to XBox Live. I decided to rectify this situation by bringing the wireless bridge I use at home (Linksys WET11) with me when I visited.

We got the security settings changed on the WET11, signed up for our free trial of XBox Live, and were soon happily online taking on the world. So far, so good.

However, after a while, my sister went off to do something else, and I decided I wanted to try to add my Gamertag to her XBox to see if anyone on my friends list was online. I exited to the dashboard to try to add my gamertag, but unfortunately, it kept asking me to create a new account, and didn't seem to give me the option of registering an existing one. I ended up turning off the XBox and spending time with my family. I know, what a totally lame way to spend the holidays. *grin*

This post was originally going to be a feature request for roaming profiles for XBox Live. However, I did some research, and it turns out that you can already do this, by saving your XBox Live account to a memory unit.

<www.xbox.com/en-US/support/live/acc-memory.htm>

I really wished I would have known this before I left for vaction. It would be nice if you could download an existing profile to an XBox via the XBox Live service, without having to mess with memory units.

Actually, there is. I did some more research and found this page:

<www.xbox.com/en-US/support/live/acc-recovery.htm>

Apparently, you can use the account recovery feature of XBox Live to move accounts between XBoxes. Sure, you invalidate your account on your original XBox when you do this, but you can just run the account recovery tool again when you get back home to restore the account.

Anyway, this caused me some grief, so I figured I'd post this in the hopes that it helps someone else.

EDIT: Wow, someone on the XBox team must read this blog. 1 day after my post, I see this up on the XBox site:

<www.xbox.com/en-us/live/about/features-roaming.htm>