Having just bought GTA IV I thought I’d play it upstairs on my 22″ tft screen rather than my usual TV downstairs, so I connected the 360 to my PC using a network cable and thought that’d do the trick… How wrong was I?!?

My current PC has Vista on it, so I thought networking would be a doddle, just bridge the connections a friend told me, however this wouldn’t work. It dropped the internet on the PC and the Xbox couldn’t connect to live. Later that evening after reading a lot of forum and blog posts I came to realise alot of people are struggling with this. I knew about ICS in XP so I assumed this would work without much hassle and to my surprise it didn’t work either! Vista gives the error:

“An error occurred while configuring Internet Connection Sharing” blah blah…

It took a lot of research but I found it was my router conflicting with the ICS setup. ICS forces your host pc to use the IP: 192.168.0.1 so if your router is already at that IP, you have a conflict. I simply changed the IP address of my router, and ICS would now work. My 360 passes all the connection tests and live works like a dream, plus I can now stream HD content from my PC to the Xbox through Media Centre effortlessly.

To enable ICS in Vista go to your Network and Sharing Centre in control panel, and click manage network connections. Right click on your wireless network connection (or the network connection where your internet comes from) and press properties. Go to the sharing tab and tick “Allow other network users to connect through this computers internet connection” and press OK. It should all work now providing you have changed your routers IP address to something other than 192.168.0.1.
Changing your routers IP address should be fairly straight forward but it’s different for each one so I’m not going to cover that here. Good luck!