XBox 360 freezes when you sign into live? Read the solution here!

Does your Xbox 360 freeze as soon as you sign into live? This started happening to me last night. The second I would sign into XBox Live, the system would freeze. Only thing I could do was power cycle. If I unplugged the network cable it would boot up fine. It would then freeze when I’d plug in the network cable and try to sign back into Live.

At this point I assumed my third 360 was about to Red Ring, as I am sure anyone else who has ever had to send back a 360 would think the same. However, as it turns out my Xbox 360 is not quite ready to die, yet — probably has a few more months of life left.

Here is the problem. When I first signed into Live last night I went to the market place and started to download the “PES” demo. At some point while it was downloading the demo in the background I decided to play a game and booted up Halo 3, which when you go into Matchmaking the 360 stops any active downloads. This is also the first time my system froze. From there, anytime I would boot up and sign into Live (it automatically signs in) my 360 would freeze.

Solution:

1: Unplug your network cable or wireless adapter
2: Go into the system blade, then memory, then hard drive
3: Delete the “PES” demo download (it has the exclamation mark contained within a yellow triangle)
3a: You might need to delete ANYTHING that has the exclamation mark)
4: Plug in your network cable or wireless adapter
5: Sign into Xbox Live or reboot

Obviously something is funky with that specific demo when it tries to resume your download, or something is going on behind the scenes with the live service. Maybe something was overlooked during their big update a few days ago and a bug as introduced.

Hopefully this has fixed your issue and you can resume killing newbs.

Frustrating XBOX Live Problems during the Holidays

I am expecting to see huge numbers from Microsoft’s Video Gaming division this holiday season. It’s hard to say if they’ve dropped the ball or not with their XBOX Live service, during what is likely the most important time for the service to be 100%. But we’ve already seen comparisons such as “XBOX Live starting to have the stability of the 360 systems” pop up all over the place.

It’s not good when a paid service experiences issues during the whole holiday break. We’ve seen a bunch of updates from Major Nelson reassuring us that “the service was never completely offline.” The problem with that statement is that while it’s great for people who where not affected, it’s sort of a smack in the face for the rest of us. Everyone that I know that uses the service has experienced some sort of issue during these last 10 days, including myself. Most of us have had problems quite a few times during the last week, and it’s damn frustrating.

I don’t doubt for a second that when Major Nelson said “The entire LIVE team has been working day and night to ensure that you can have a great LIVE experience,” he was not exaggerating. The LIVE team understand they need to provide exceptional service, especially since it’s paid.

All that being said, I honestly believe that Microsoft needs to offer some compensation to all the LIVE users for these very frustrating problematic times. A free week or two of Live? Maybe 800 MS points? I have no idea what, but it would certainly be a shame not to take responsibility and make this right.

Halo 3: Over 1 MILLION users logged in and playing Halo 3 on XBox Live right now!

I am not sure what Microsoft’s XBox Live record of the number of users playing a specific game at any given time is, but there are currently over 1 MILLION Halo 3 players on XBox Live logged in and playing. I would assume that this should set a record for a number of XBL users in a specific game.

That is a hell of lot of people playing Halo 3 on a Friday night!

1,080,888 to be exact! Here’s a photo: