Helpful Gamertag Info

When I first got an Xbox Live Gold membership, I thought it was great. I bought a month subscription and played on it almost every day. After the month long membership expired, I never bothered to renew it until about 2 years later. The reason for my urge to renew it was a consequence of playing the landmark Xbox 360 game, Halo 3, online. So off I went to customer friendly GameStop where I purchased a 12-month subscription with a 1-month free. When I got home, I went straight to my Xbox 360 and put the Ethernet cable back into its rightful place again-the back of my 360, so I could connect to live again. As soon as I got online, it signed in as my old gamer tag as a silver membership. Silver is where you can still connect to live but you can't immerse into the full gaming community like you can with the Gold membership. So I went to upgrade my silver membership to gold (so I thought) with the PIN number on the back of the card I received when I purchased the Gold membership. After I typed in the PIN numbers and hit continue, a pop-up came saying "Error." I got very frustrated and tried repeatedly to put the numbers in to see if it would work. After many failures, I finally called Xbox live support. The man told me that my previous account that I was trying to upgrade was deleted from their database (I forgot I had canceled it from my credit card 2 years ago). He told me I had to create a new gamer tag and forget about my other gamer tag even though it still shows up on my console. The reason the old gamer tag stays on your console is because your previous saved games save to that gamer tag...sadly I found that out the hard way. So my message here is if you cancel a membership that was using your credit card and try to get gold membership back on it by redeeming it with a subscription card, you will have to create a new gamer tag but keep your old one! Don't lose all your progress on your games like I did. If there are any questions that you may have make sure you get your answers before trying anything with your account. If you just try something you may be out some cash.