For Unlucky 360 Owner Seventh Time's the Charm

Microsoft has maintained that the problems occasionally reported by Xbox 360 owners are not very prevalent; just a small percentage of 360s are faulty, they say. That may be so, but for one unlucky console owner it's taken seven faulty consoles for him to get customer service satisfaction. The Mercury News discusses the tale of Rob Cassingham, a self professed 'Xbox fanboy'. He and his wife Mindy run a gaming center, and were responsible (via direct purchases and through word of mouth) for more than a dozen 360 purchases. For his business, he had six machines ... and every one of them failed. Even one of the replacements for the original unit failed, and for every replacement he's had to wait two weeks to get a new system. As he puts it, "Why spend money for rims on a car that spends 90 percent of its time in the shop?" After the Merc's Dean Takahashi referred his case to Peter Moore, he finally received a new machine as a replacement for his most recent faulty model. Cassingham is still deciding whether to keep it or not.

Heat & Hard-Drive

[HappySqurriel]

The combination of the ammount of heat being produced by the XBox 360 (and PS3) is probably the #1 reason these systems fail ...

Everyone knows how hot a 100w light-bulb gets (because we've all been foolish enough to touch one) and both the XBox 360 and PS3 have the equivilant of 2 of these bulbs running in a very tight space; this heat can not be particularly good for any of the components and (probably) rapidly ages everything.

Huh

[ObiWanStevobi]

I have mine on the way back to MS right now. DVD drive went out completely after 8 months. Just like the Original Xbox. I actually consider myself lucky mine went out in time to be covered by the extended warranty. I think that will always be something Playstaion has up on the 360, hardware quality. Obviously MS learned nothing from the crappy xbox drives the first go round.

Not broken

[digidave]

Everyone always says that failure statistics on the web are poor because nobody comes around and says their system is working fine. Maybe we can do an informal Slashdot poll of all Xbox 360 owners.

If your Xbox 360 has failed, reply with the subject "Broken". If your Xbox 360 has not failed reply with the subject "Not broken". This will make it easy to scan responses without opening each post. Use the post comment area if you have something more to say.

Hardware sucks.

[TeraCo]

If all of them failed (and he bought them all at the same time for his xbox emporium), perhaps he just got a bad batch? We bought a bunch of Dell Poweredges and now 2 years later, they're all flaking out with CPU errors - 3 in the last week.

Ain't Coincidence a Bitch?

[Bones3D_mac]

Seriously... you'd think everyone has issues with the things. My release date 360 still runs just as well as it did since it arrived.

Get over the anti-Microsoft high-horse, guys. The console is perfectly stable for those of us who take the time to clean up around the thing an don't stuff it into an air-tight hole somewhere.

Three not broken

[MBraynard]

One is 10 months old, the other two are two months old.

I think the guy in the story's problem is likely his power system in the building. It may be low or have some kind of wiring issue. That's way too much of a coincidence.

Re:Heat & Hard-Drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a link to any examples of PS3s overheating? The PS3 has an amazing piece of cooling tech inside that has been written about in many computer news sites.

The only hardware problem I've ever seen reported from PS3 owners is one or two people who had drives that weren't ejecting discs properly.

As to the Xbox 360 there has been yet no one verifiable reason why so many of them fail. Silly products like that intercooler device have give people the erroneous assumption that heat is what is causing 360s to die over and over again. Right now only Microsoft has an idea of what went wrong with the 360 hardware design and manufacturing. Whatever the reason or reasons it can't be something simple if so many people are still talking about and falling victim to those problems.

Re:Heat & Hard-Drive

[Dutch Gun]

No one seems to mention the fact that this guy bought his machines for a gaming center. This places those machines in a whole different category of use than a home user (longer hours, rougher treatment, etc). Someone already mentioned dirty power as a likely culprit. We also notice from reading the article that his gaming center has shut down - impending lawsuit? We only have his word that three of the machines were "personal use only". I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the failure rate is under 10%. Would anyone like to calculate the odds of someone getting 7 out of 7 failed machines given that (probably overestimated) failure rate?

All in all, it just doesn't add up. Maybe I'm too skeptical for my own good, but I'm just having a hard time buying this. The fact that I personally know a quite a few people (at least a couple of dozen, including myself) with perfectly operational 360s - (a number of them launch units) with no failures so far further fuels my doubting nature.