So i’m thinking of upgrading my 20gb launch 360 with an elite model. I have some questions though.
1: Does the Elite come with the transfer cable so i can transfer all my stuff from the old 360? If not, is there an easy way to transfer my around 15 gigs of saves and Xbox live downloads?
2: How do you get sound from the elite to a receiver when using HDMI? My current setup uses component and the sound goes to the receiver through an optical cable. My receiver has no HDMI input.
3: If i put my old 360 in the living room for the kids to use, do i need to recover my gamertag every time i want to play one of “my” games? Or is it easier to just switch harddrives?
No, but you can order one for free (see the links at the bottom of this page.)
The Elite comes with an adapter that lets you split off plain old analog audio while the HDMI cable is attached. (The non-Elite units don’t, in which case they have to buy a separate cable package to get it.)
Switching hard drives is much easier than constantly recovering the gamertag. Putting the profile on a memory unit might be even easier, but it also depends on whether you want to transfer saves and DLC between the systems as well.
Excellent, thank you Fugitive. Do you know if you can order the cable in advance or do you need the serial # for the elite unit?
edit forget it, found out. Is it just me, or is it incredibly annoying that you have to print out a form, fill it out and then send it by mail to another country rather than put this up as a web form? Of course, this way it takes a couple of weeks more.
Yes, it’s very annoying. You’d think they’d be nicer to those of us willing to punish oursevles by buying multiple 360s. I’ve searched all over for someone selling this transfer cable seperately but it would appear nobody does. Quite frankly I’m surprised that, at the very least, Microsoft isn’t even willing to charge me $100 or something to buy one.
I agree, very annoying. In fact if I’d known about having to recover my gamertag beforehand I may have chosen a different system as my secondary. Besides playing the same games, it ties me down to one system at a time unless I play courier with an HD or memory card. Stupid design.
I’m still not completely sure why they tie you down to one machine anyway. I can still only use all my purchased DLC when logged into my own account, so what the hell does it matter which 360 the hard drive containing that content is attached to? Maybe they didn’t anticipate people would like their piece of garbage hardware enough to buy more than one.
Actually, the machine tie is so that you can use that DLC without having to be logged in on your account – on the machine it’s tied to, you can use it if you’re offline or on any other gamertag on that machine. All of these annoyances about managing the profile are really about trying to prevent you from having multiple copies of the profile getting out of sync, since so much information is embedded in it.
Right, I’m a bit confused about this. I want to transfer the save game files for a couple of games from one 360 to another. Some googling suggests that this is impossible without resorting to the transfer cable mentioned above, whereas others suggest it’s simply a case of using a memory card. Before I risk splashing out on an otherwise useless memory card, can someone clarify whether I can transfer save game files from the HD onto the memory card and then onto the second xbox (which is in another country incidentally)? Perhaps I can change the save game location from HD to memory card mid-game? (I’d better go and check that one)
Alternatively, I found the following potentially dubious PC utility for apparently transferring such files between the 360 HD and a PC connected over USB. What do you think? Steer clearage?
Rather than buying an elite, consider picking up a Jasper Arcade unit, a new 120GB drive, and Microsoft’s HDMI cable. You’ll pay the same price (400 bucks) but you’ll get the newest hardware iteration as well as the transfer cable you need (it comes packaged with the 120).
You’ll get a standard def cable, but it doesn’t sound like an issue (because you have hdmi + the existing component cable if needed), and you won’t have the extra headset, but the tradeoffs are worth it, IMO.
It depends on the game, some of them don’t allow you to copy or move the save game from its original location at all, some only allow you to ‘move’ it and not copy so that you can’t have two copies of it but you can move it to a different location, and some let you copy or move freely. And some games embed their save data right in your profile, so it’ll follow you around anyway.
The transfer cable handles all of these cases, but is overkill since it forces you to move the entire drive, and I think it erases the destination drive first, so it’s really only for moving from a smaller drive to a larger one.
Try googling for the specific games you want and “move save” or something like that.
Wait, so if I switched the HDs on my 360s, ONLY the DLC would be messed up, right? Everything else would be fine. Is that correct? Even then, as long as I logged into Live, all would be well again. So if my Elite breaks, and I use my backup 360 to play RB, I can still just pop the HD from my Elite to my Pro, right? And then play like always, as long as I log into Live.
Saved games and all that would just transfer over perfectly, correct? In other words, I could continue my Fallout game whether I am logged into Live or not.
Yeah just swapping your HDD between consoles and giving both consoles online access is the only reasonable way to use multiple Xbox 360s, IMO. If you set your Live account to auto-login (I don’t remember if that is the default), it’ll seamlessly log you into Live each time you power up a 360 with the logged-in HDD to one of your 360s, assuming they both have a network connection available. Doing the “Recover Gametag” thing is way too painful, and even using a memory card to transfer data is too much of a pain when you’re trying to sync save games from multiple games, etc.
I’m a GS store manager and that made zero sense. The answer to the question about the HD is “yes”, but why would trading in a PS2 prevent you from doing what I suggested? You lost me.
GameStop has a special promotion going on here in Norway where you can trade a PS2+5 games+some cash depending on model for a 360 arcade/pro/elite. The deal is pretty good actually, much better than the normal trade in deals they offer. I’m not using my PS2 any more and my kids will get my old 360.
