Published on : Dec 31, 2012
Category : General
As a pure Microsoft fan, I pretty much buy anything that gets shipped by Microsoft whether I use it or not. XBOX is one such device which was just sitting and collecting dust in my TV cabinet for a while now. During this holiday season I decided to clean up the TV cabinet, get rid of an unused setup box lying there for couple of years and also decided to get rid of a old Windows XP Media centre PC (can you believe on the case it says Pentium 4!!) and take advantage of XBOX media features.
What I’ve learned
XBOX Live Gold Membership
If you really wanted to make use of your XBOX for something other than playing games, you will require a XBOX Live Gold membership. This costs around £5/month. The reason for the membership is, certain apps are classified as premium and available only to Gold members. Microsoft classified even some of the basic apps like YouTube, Internet Explorer as premium apps.
Trouble signing up for Live Gold Membership
My attempts to sign up for live Gold account right in the XBOX console failed consistently with some strange error code. The easy option to fix it is, just go to
http://www.xbox.com and register online, go through the complete upgrade process using the credit card. Then you can go to the XBOX console and download your profile giving your Microsoft Live ID and password.
Family Pass Code
Looks like this one was set during some default installation or I can’t remember the pass code. There is no easy option to reset it, of course it makes sense to not make it so obvious. Kids these days are much smarter. To reset XBOX family pass code you need to go to System>Console Settings> System Info and need to press keys in your controller in certain order LB, LT, RB, RT, X, Y… etc. There are various such codes in the forums, but the reality is, those key code combinations are unique to each (or may be a range) XBOX. The only way to reset it is to call
XBOX support and provide them the serial key, they will give you the exact key combination.