Guide: Getting Started With Your Wii U

The biggest advice I can give to my European friends: Give yourself a good 2 hours of time for the updates, just in case. And for the love of all that is holy and sacred, don't unplug the thing while updating, even if it doesn't look like its doing anything.

*Punches 3DS for not letting me watch YouTube

And for those not aware, you can't do the system transfer multiple times. You have to download things again that won't fit into the Wii system memory. I don't think I had enough stuff on my DSi to fill the memory, hence getting everything done at once. Was expecting to be able to go back to the Wii and fill the memory card again.

This leaves me with about 70 VC downloads to do

The more you know...!

Connecting to the internet was a cinch. Staying connected was the problem. I had to enter in the info a half dozen times after every single update (firmware, hulu plus, netflix, youtube). Each time I got disconnected. It turns out that that the problem is quite widespread. The solution entails manually entering all of your wifi info rather than having the console do it automatically.

@ElMastero So that's why I had to re-enter my Wifi details like 3 times already. Oh well the Wii U is worth it.

@ajcismo Or just let it download in the background while playing Nintendo land.

get a Wii LAN adapter and never worry again. WiFi sucks for anything that requires a steady connection

@C-Olimar
Good call, but I'm still too old-school where I'm afraid to run any programs when doing updates of any kind, on any device. New gadgets are usually buggy gadgets.

My wii u connected easily, much like the 3ds. My brother on the other hand had to go to his ip configuration on his laptop and enter it in manually. I think it's because his modem is new and mine is about 8 years old. Nintendo does a good job supporting older technology hence the required 2.0 hard drive, etc.

@Dogpigfish I had to do mine manually too - was a right pain!

@ElMastero ive never had this issue. Hm.

@Raiko lol me too i started it right when i got it and expected to wait A while so i went out to eat. I came back excited and saw that 30 minutes went by....then i got depressed but then i saw it was done and i was all happy face.

Getting started with WiiU:
STILL NEED A WIIU!!!

I'll repeat here what I posted in the hardware review: I had huge problems getting online. In the end I disabled network security to run the system update. After that the manual entry method worked fine, but not before.