Back in the “old days” of the first Xbox it was pretty simple to be able to use your Live gamertag on a friend’s console. All you had to do was throw it on a memory card and copy it to their hard drive. It could then live on both consoles without the need to swap it back and forth. I had my old Xbox Live account on three different consoles so I could play Return To Castle Wolfenstein or Halo 2 without a hitch. Now in these DRM-fueled times your gamertag is tied to a specific console and must be “recovered” when you want to play over Live (and not as a “guest) at a friend’s house or to make sure that you get points for the achievements you might unlock. This long process involves downloading from some magical server that can take upwards of 20 minutes to complete. I’ve often wondered why this takes so damn long when it seems like this should be a quick download. What’s in this file that takes up so much space? Is the server extremely slow or overrun with activity? My frustration with the process reached such a pitch that I actually decided to start looking into it to try finding an explanation or alternative methods. Continue Reading »