What is the best way to use your gamertag when gaming at a friends house?The "recover gamertag" process brings up a scary message about losing gavesaves.

Thanks,
robb

I physically brought my hard drive to a friend's place once. Worked fine.

You can also use a memory card if you guys are doing split screen signing in with both GTs. Just don't forget to bring your GT save home with you, since unlike the XBox, the 360 set up won't let you have your gamertag on multiple units. There's no "copy" function just a "move" order when you use a memory card. :(

We did a recover on my xbox for my friends gamertag. worked fine and didn't delete anything of mine.

You can also use a memory card if you guys are doing split screen signing in with both GTs. Just don't forget to bring your GT save home with you, since unlike the XBox, the 360 set up won't let you have your gamertag on multiple units. There's no "copy" function just a "move" order when you use a memory card. :(

Yeah, I figured I would have to go the memory card route. A buddy came over last night and we wanted to each be logged into our Gamertags (gotta get those achievements :D)


We did a recover on my xbox for my friends gamertag. worked fine and didn't delete anything of mine.

But did it delete anything of his ;) We went through the whole recover process, but in the end he decided not to risk it. This is straight from the xbox website:

We do not recommend that you recover your gamertag to a friend's console as a convenience when roaming—you could lose your saved games.

You should never be recovering someone else's account on your console, or vice versa. It invalidates the previous encryption keys and issues a new set, so everything that was stored in an encrypted format becomes unusable.

Instead, you should be using memory cards to "move" the account temporary from the HD to the memory card, and then when you're done, move it back. This preserves the encryption keys and prevents loss of data.

Great way to force people to buy memory cards. Memory cards are highly profitable, and this is a great way to keep them from becoming obsolete. Plus, everybody knows that Valves Steam platform is totally worthless because you aren't forced to use a memory card to log in to your profile.

Yeah, this new "feature" totally sucks. It's really the only realy complaint I have with the design of the 360 software. This is just totally stupid since the original Xbox allowed you to have muliple live accounts on a single box.

This is just totally stupid since the original Xbox allowed you to have muliple live accounts on a single box.You can have multiple live accounts on a single Xbox 360. You can't have your live account on multiple Xbox 360s though. This was a conscious design choice to try to protect saved games and downloaded content from being exploited by making multiple copies of a Gamertag.

So, let's say you have multiple consoles in the home. Assuming for a minute that we're only talking about a single user with one account, I have a couple of questions. Can you just shuttle the HDD between the 2 rather than moving the account to/from a memory card? If so, would this then make all HDD content and the single account available on both units?

My thinking here is that I have been meaning to get a second unit for the basement. I'm the only one who plays so only one unit will be in use at any given time. I'd ideally like to have full access to my account and all downloaded content regardless of which machine I was on. Can I do this by shuttling the HDD? Also, the XBL service is tied to an account vs a machine right? What I mean by that is if I have 2 machines and only one account, do I need more than one XBL subscription? Thanks!

By the way, I will be holding off on a new unit to see if any of these larger HDD, HDMI out rumors materialize for an upgraded 360.

Jeff

^^

Swapping the drive will work fine. Or if you have a memory card, you can store your Live account on the card at all times and just carry the card from console to console instead of moving the drive back and forth. It's not necessary to move the account from the card to the drive every time....the account is fully usable from the memory card.

We just got a second 360 to be used primarily by the boys.

I used the memory card to move their gamertags semi-perminently on their hard drive. I moved my gamertag to the memory card and I'm leaving it there. I plug it into whichever console I'm going to use. I did this primarily so we can still play all the xbla games we bought on our original console.

xbla rules:

. any gamertag can play on the console that purchased
. the gamertag that purchased can play on any console
. other gamertags can not play on other consoles

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't considered just leaving the account to the mem card after a "Move". I figured it had to be moved onto a HDD to be usable, but that wouldn't make sense since not all consoles have one. I do have one clarification question about these, though:


xbla rules:

. any gamertag can play on the console that purchased
. the gamertag that purchased can play on any console
. other gamertags can not play on other consoles

I understand point one (being able to play purchased content on a console that it was initially purchased from with any gamertag) and point 2 (taking a gamertag with the content to another console to play it) but point 3 seems a bit unclear. Does that mean that if you do point 2, and take purchased content to another console, that no other gamertag can be used to play the content on the other (non-purchasing) machine?

Thanks.

Jeff

We did a recover on my xbox for my friends gamertag. worked fine and didn't delete anything of mine.

+1, me and my brother did this 2 days ago. He signed into my xbox with his gamertag so we were both online at the same time on same xbox, no side effects I can see yet.
-Evangelo2

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't considered just leaving the account to the mem card after a "Move". I figured it had to be moved onto a HDD to be usable, but that wouldn't make sense since not all consoles have one. I do have one clarification question about these, though:



I understand point one (being able to play purchased content on a console that it was initially purchased from with any gamertag) and point 2 (taking a gamertag with the content to another console to play it) but point 3 seems a bit unclear. Does that mean that if you do point 2, and take purchased content to another console, that no other gamertag can be used to play the content on the other (non-purchasing) machine?

Thanks.

Jeff

Yes, that's right. Also, if you move your gamertag to a new machine to play, the xbox needs to be connected to Live for you to be able to play the full versions of the games. this is so the machine can verify you've bought them. If you're unplugged you're limited to the trial versions.

+1, me and my brother did this 2 days ago. He signed into my xbox with his gamertag so we were both online at the same time on same xbox, no side effects I can see yet.
-Evangelo2
You'll see. Ask your brother to recover his gamertag back to his own console, then disconnect his network connection and ask him to try and play an Xbox Live Arcade game he previously paid to download. The game will play in trial / demo mode because the encryption keys are invalidated and the game will only be able to be played in full mode when the account is signed into Live.

So does this only affect Xbox live arcade games?

So does this only affect Xbox live arcade games?
Any purchased downloadable content. A few free items have the lockout also.