ZarkSeven

Just wanted to give an quick update for the Child’s Play Charity fundraising efforts I promoted several times on my blog towards the end of last year.  Their grand total this year was $1,434,377!  A new high!  Thank you to everyone who donated.  Children in hospitals around the country (and the world) greatly appreciate it.

On a more personal note… I won a prize in the CAG Fund for Child’s Play 2008 Charity Raffle Extravaganza!

I usually donate to the charity via the Cheapassgamer.com fundraising drive, because I frequent that site often and like to support them as well as the charity.  And every $5 donated gets you a ticket to their raffle, with consoles and games as prizes.  This year the CAG’s beat their personal best with a grand total of $32,677.  And lo and behold, I won a prize in the raffle.  And not just any prize… the #3 prize on the list of 57… an Xbox 360 Elite!  Needless to say, I was blown away!  Huge thanks go to Marten in the CAG community for donating my prize, as well as other console, iPods and games to the raffle.

Marten shipped me the console right away, but it took me awhile to get it all set up because of Microsoft’s janky  digital rights issues.  I know, I know, there are reasons, but still… what a hassle.  I bought a 20GB Xbox 360 back before the Elite came out, and while it has held up well (no RROD so far!), I’ve since bought a TV with HDMI inputs, and the 20GB drive has been pretty much full for the last year, and I’ve had to periodically dump stuff to make room.  So I wanted to swap out the contents and licenses to the new Elite.  Boy, I know more about that process than I ever wished to know.

First, you have to move the data from one drive to another, which requires software and an Xbox-specific data cable.  Apparently, if you went out and bought the ridiculously overpriced 120GB hard drive,  the cable and software are included.  But if you are moving to a new console like I was, you have to get Xbox 360 Hard Drive Transfer Kit sent to you from Microsoft.  It’s free, but it took almost 3 weeks from the time I mailed in the form until the time it arrived at my door.   Which means you basically can’t use your new console for that long, because the transfer wipes the new drive of any previous data.  You’d think they could make that process a little less painful, or at least send out those kits quicker.

Once you have the kit, you hook up the new console, and attach the old drive to it.  You then run the cable from the old drive to the new one, which is just laying to the side.  The transfer took about an hour and a half, and when it was done, I got a message saying that some of the data was corrupt and didn’t transfer.  How does that happen on a closed system like the 360??  Was the hard drive going bad or something?  I looked later and did not notice anything specific that didn’t transfer over, but I’m waiting for the day when I fire up Mass  Effect or something and find my save game doesn’t work or something.

After you have the data transferred over, you have to transfer the licenses, because the licenses are associated with the console ID, and not the hard drive.  You put the new drive on the new Xbox 360 and fire it up and log into Xbox Live.  You then go on Xbox.com.  It recognizes you logged into the new console and you tell it to transfer the licenses to the new console ID.  Once that is done, you have to re-download any licenses you need to the new Xbox.  Everything I tried ran fine without me re-downloading anything, so I’m not sure why there is this step, but I’m sure it’ll bite me in the ass sometime.

Once I did all that, the new Elite was ready to go.  I decided to move the old 360 upstairs so the kids could use it to stream Netflix movies on it, which opened up a whole new can of worms.  First, I didn’t want the kids to log into my Live account to stream Netflix or do anything else, so I had to figure out how to set them up with their own child accounts which I control as a parent.  The Xbox has a lot of good parental control features, which is good, if not a little time consuming to set up.

Next, I had to get Netflix set up.  After some digging, I found out that your Netflix account is tied to the console, not the Live ID.  And it can be tied to any number of consoles you’d like.  So you have have 360′s all over your house and tie them all to your one Netflix account.  They all see the same queue, but you don’t have to have a separate Netflix accounts.  However, Microsoft requires you to have a Gold Live membership in order to stream Netflix, so I had to buy a separate Gold membership for one of the kids so that they can stream Netflix to that console.  We’ll see if they use it enough to warrant continuing that when the Gold membership expires.

So all in all, it took me a few weeks to get everything all set up and working, new and old, and to post this post.  Thanks to CheapyD for the raffle on Cheapassgamer.com, and to Marten for supplying the prize, and congrats to the Child’s Play Charity on a successful fundraising drive.

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