Resetting your TCP/IP Stack

People have all kinds of nerdy reasons that they may need to reset their TCP/IP Stack. For me, I was unable o connect to Games for Windows Live. But if you ever find yourself offline and stranded with not internet connection except the browser on your smartphone, it may be a good idea to try resetting your TCP/IP stack!

All of the nerds and geeks on the internet will just tell you that, matter-of-factly, without ever telling you how. Here are some very good basics that you can try to troubleshoot yourself, when you don’t have internet access, network connectivity isn’t working, or when some things work and somethings don’t. Why do these features get so messed up? The world may never know. But it’s good to know there’s a few things you can do to try and fix it, apart from rebooting your modem and router! 😉

The following assumes you have at least local Administraor rights on your computer (most people do, to the distress of millions of IT folk).

First: Reset WINSOCK:
XP: Click Start, then Run, and type in CMD and press enter.
Vista/7: Click Start, then type CMD (in the Search Programs an Files bar at the bottom) and press enter.

This will bring up a familiar black Command Prompt Window. In there, type the following, and press enter:

netsh winsock reset

After rebooting the computer, see if that helped. No? Alright, that was just the WINSOCK portion of things, now let’s try resetting the whole TCP/IP stack.

Open a command prompt, same as above. Then type the following as a single line:

netsh int ip reset c:\resetstack.txt

And, of course, reboot the computer. Did that help? If not, then at least you can say you’ve tried – but I was lucky and this resolved a very strange issue for me where literally everything else I was trying was working, except communicating with the Games for Windows Live service, which is why I have to give credit for the inspiration of this post to a user who calls himself “eastmanblues” on the Xbox Live forums.

2010 – Zen Albatross – Masada Gestalt

I’m nerd and proud of it. I’ve mentioned several nerdcore and chip-tune bands so far on the blog, and I’m not done, yet. This week’s Music Monday highlights an up and comer who, officially, has only made a “single” of two songs publically available.

Going by the name Zen Albatross, this Brooklyn based electronic music composer has made his Masada Gestalt single available for free. It is chiptune at its finest. See how he does it, below:

ZEN ALBATROSS (LIVE) from Rochester Chip on Vimeo.

Update your Xbox 360 without Xbox Live

Although the Xbox 360 was clearly designed with online play in mind, and the latest Dashboard and Firmware updates have clearly taken woven Xbox Live and Internet Based features deep in to the fabric of the Xbox 360, some players still do not have their consoles hooked up to the internet. There are also more than a few cases where, the place where you have your Xbox 360 hooked up might not have a very fast internet connection. Sure you can play games, maybe even stream some video, but to download hundreds of megabytes worth of dashboard updates just doesn’t seem plausible. Well, you’re in luck. Microsoft offers a few different ways to update your Dashboard, that don’t require internet access on your Xbox 360.

There are several options, but I really like the method of burning the files to a CD. You can also use a USB hard drive or flsah drive. Some game discs will even include the Dashboard updates and prompt you to install them before playing the game. As always, head over to Microsoft’s Support Site for Xbox 360 to learn how you can download the latest Dashboard update and install it, without ever conecting your console to the internet.