I’ve connected my Xbox360 to my router using these Netgear powerline networking plugs, which work like a charm. I get probably 75-80Mbps from them across separate floors. They cost £90 for the pair, but I much prefer this to using wireless.

The problem I’m having at the moment with the xbox, is that when I connect to my computer (XP Pro) to share my music and video files, it errors unless I restart the UPnP service (which also restarts the WMP & Zune networking services). Now, in order to get it working correctly the first time, I had to share the media via both the WMP and Zune software, despite them being the same software with a different front end on it. Looking at the event logs both the WMP & Zune network services error on startup, which I’m thinking may be to do with the fact that they’re trying to load too soon. I’ve looked into delaying the services from starting, the method for which seems to be setting a dependecy in the registry so they start a bit later. The suggested service that starts late is the spooler which seems like quite a good idea. I will test this and report back.

“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\(Service name), where (Service name) is the service you want to delay. Add a REG_MULTI_SZ value named DependOnService to the key, then edit the value of DependOnService to add the service name of the service you want started before the selected service. “