So that you don’t have to waste your weekend… I wasted mine. Sometime over the last Friday night network on my studio/office computer stopped working. First I thought my media server was just not working – but it turns out Windows was telling me my network cable was unplugged. I sighed.

Long story short, turns out (after a full day of running up and down two flights of stairs to test and moving my entire studio around) I settled on the problem being my craptastic SMB 8-port gig router (SMCGS8 if you happen to have one…). Once I shuffled the cables around to ports that did work I sat down to watch some episodes of Holmes On Homes over my XBOX 360 Media extender – nothing worked. Blah.

My XBOX 360 could connect to LIVE so what the hell? It’s a wired network. Shouldn’t be having issues, right? So I put on my tech support hat and deleted the MXD profiles and started the connection process again. Easy – I’ve done that many times before for whatever reasons. (Technically as any good tech support person would do, I rebooted everything!)

Should have worked, right? Wrong. While I was about ready to get myself a new Dell 2716 router to replace my SMC one – I came across this forum posting. Thank YOU! Seems that the Media Extender doesn’t like when your computer has more than one IP address or more than one NIC card (yeah – I know that it’s redundant to say NIC and card.) So I disabled the second NIC in my server – relaunched the connection program and I’m back in business! (I’ll probably have to get a new router some time…) I’m soooo happy that I found that post. Do you know how hard it is to find a solution for such a vague error message on Google? You end up finding a thousand pages about people who don’t even know how to… well – never mind!

So if you’re facing an “XBOX 360 Not Found” message in your media extender and you KNOW your network is correct – double check your NICs or IP addresses on your MCE computer.