Be Excellent To Each Other

I've moved my 360 into the spare room so as not to annoy the feyonce too much, and allow for evening gaming while she obsessively watches Wedding TV.

Alas, our only phone point is in the living room, so if I want to use XBox Live (which I do), I need to stick a cable from the living room, across the living room, and into the spare room. This is annoying, and involves a high chance of falling over or breaking things.

So, the XBox 360 Wireless Bridge thing would seem like a useful addition. After all, my Wii connects to the net wirelessly, so there's no reason why my 360 cannot follow suit.

Does anyone use one of these? Are they any good? Will they have an effect on playing games? Are they available anywhere else for less than the very expensive price in the link above (GBP46.96)?

Thank y'all.

Cheaper alternatives are available (search for gaming wireless bridge or something similar)

If you still really want the MS one, I may be able to sell you mine.

I've got one and it works very well even though my router is downstairs. I paid £50 for mine though.

I have one. They are much too expensive for what they are (consider it's just a vanilla USB 802.11g adaptor, which in the PC world would leave you enough change from a tenner for a bag of chips). It works fine though, good signal etc.

Don't buy one. Instead, you have two options. One: get a generic ethernet-wifi bridge (like this thing but a cheaper one) which will plug into the ethernet port of the 360 and connect to the wireless network. I have two of these (Netgear WGE111s) and they aren't that good, but that's because that particularly model isn't good. Other models work great.

Two: get a ethernet-powerline bridge (like these) which, again, plugs into the ethernet port of the 360 and then into the wall sockets. I don't have these but will probably be buying some soon. Some of my colleagues have the 85Mbpa ones and report they are very good as long as your house was wired sometime in the last few decades and you don't plug phone chargers or other tiny plugpacks into the wall next to them.

Both will be fast enough for gaming. If your wireless signal is very strong they will be about the same speed overall, if your wireless signal is weaker the powerline kit is likely to be quicker. This may be important if you want to stream video to it down the road (e.g. if you put a PC in the spare room with DivX or whatever on the hard disk and stream to the Xbox in the living room for playback). Both wireless and powerline bridges can be used with other consoles and computers, making them much more useful than the Xbox's adaptor.

Craig has one of the XBox branded ones and it works very well.

I have the official extortionate one, it works well. I paid full whack.

Cheers for the info, everyone (especially Richard!).

Rciahrd,

Option one - I can't find any examples of what you show that are much cheaper than the official one.

Option two - my flat is from the 60s, and I will be running my PC, speakers, 360, monitor, and TV (at the very least) from one wall socket.

The wireless signal should be good, as the router is only about three metres away... I just know that if I leave the wires there, Maria will trip over it and break herself (or worse, break my 360!).

I have the official one, thats actually a decent price from Amazon.

I paid £20 second hand

I may just go for the official one then, or steal my mate's. He got the Red Rings of Death, sent back his 360, got the RRoD again and hasn't gotten around to sending it off again. I can maybe borrow his for a while, at least.

Hopefully that won't nuke my carefully set up NAT settings that got the darn thing to work in the first place...

AND WHILE WE'RE TALKING WIRELESS NETWORKS...

Any ideas on doing the same for my PC? Should I get a wireles USB thingy? I actually have a wireless card salvaged from the carcass of my old PC, but I don't know how to attach it to my computer to make it work.

I R Tech Fule

I had one of these which should be pretty cheap now. Bought it initially for my Xbox but works fine on a 360 too.

I have an official 360 wireless jobby. It's crap, although I never really bothered discounting other factors (the electric underfloor heating in the bathroom fucks shit up, for instance).

I have DLink homeplugs of the 200mbps variety, and have managed to get it up to being able to consistently give 15mbps after extensively moving stuff around and testing. My flat was wired about 5 years ago. Based on the quality of everything else, by baboons. Even when they were working extremely poorly, my 360 was more than happy with Forza and GoW multiplayer.

Homeplugs are my preference for everything except laptops, these days (the wireless in my main laptop has died, and using a LAN cable - even the long one the 360 comes with - is intensely annoying).

If it's only 3m away can't you just run a network lead around the edge under the carpet or something?

This is what I would do.

Another option is to move your internet router next to your Xbox and wireless up whatever needs it in the other room.

In theory, but I'm rubbish at anything practical. And I'm also very lazy.

It would also be awkward as the router is in a room with proper wooden flooring, and then there's the hallway carpet, and then the spare room. I dunno... it's all far too complicated for an idiot like me. As such, I intend to do what I do with all such problems and throw money at it.

It's not wired to anything in the other room; the other room contains our only phone socket.

.... so get a telephone extension cable? a spond from poundland or something. Thinner cable for to run under shit n things.

You can probably get another wireless router and bridge the network for less than the official adapter.

Nonsense man! You CAN do it and the only thing stopping you doing it is if it all goes tits up, like it probably will as you have NEGATIVE THINKING, then the way to solve it is to get a man in, and then watch the man fix it and then you have learnt stuffs about things and can have +500 EXP leading to a LEVEL UP! and things like that.

A LEVEL UP, you say?

Is that how much things cost in poundland? I'm glad you've told me!

You're welcome. I know how THICK you are.

well it could be like spond stretcher where things can cost several pounds.

And I thank you for your patience with that.

Lemon.

It's like wrestl-*dead*

*drags thread back on topic*

I use an Edimax7209APg, which is a wireless access point, giving a wired bridge to the Xbox, Xbox 360, PC, and Second PC.

Works perfectly. Cost me £30.

I wire mine into the router, which happened to live next to where I wanted the 360 to go. everything else in the house is wireless. But if I'd needed to get the wifi dongle (official for guarantee of compatability and 360 peripheral loveliness, they do make nice stuff) I'd certainly have gone to Blockbusters branches across town or CEX and seen how much they have them for. £20-30 for a working unboxed official dongle is the norm in Cardiff, and £30 while steep means you've got the official thing and it WILL go properly, especially over three metres. My mate has one, paid full whack a few weeks ago, plugged it in, threw it his PSK and off he went. Never looked back.

Someone referred to DLink up the thread. I'm 'rocking' a DSL G640-t which is a shit but good enough to keep anyway router with a nauseating UI and a predeliction towards wanting a cold reboot every couple of weeks for fuck all reason I can fathom. I've made a few quid these last couple of years setting up wifi networks in small offices, with a variety of routers (and by this I mean getting the router talking to their ISP, setting a WPA-PSK and explaining for an hour and a half to the boss and his most computery employee that it is a password and they need to write it down and put it in a safe and no, it can't be anything remotely obvious because an enemy will sit outside and get kiddy porn on their laptop to spite you.) and I've found that your modern day Netgear routers in the £50 range are as solid as a fucking rock. I'll bet my Jaguar and GBA Micro would connect to one of those first time, out of the box, if I tried, they're that good.

We've got two of these, one each for the lad's 360s. Never had a problem with them, cheap as chips on ebay too.