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.

I got a new unit 1st time around

[0kComputer]

This was around mid December, I called cust support and went through all the troubleshooting procedures. Long story short, they wanted me to pay 140 for the repairs. After asking for her supervisor etc... they finally agreed to send me a new one for free. They sent a box and i put my old unit in and fed ex'd it back about a week later i got a brand new unit. The total turnaround time was about 10 days. Haven't had any problems since. Since then i've learned that they extended the warranty to one year (from 3 months). So I have to say that my experience was generally good given the situation. Not sure why they would keep sending refurbs. All I can say is that i just followed their instructions to a tea. Maybe this guy was doing something wrong.

Oh noes!

[Cervantes]

While it does sound from TFA that he had a hard time of it, the article also has him complaining about all the time it took with tech support for each machine. A whole 20 minutes? They made him turn it off and back on? They actually did troubleshooting? ZOMG!

I'd rather have a competent tech on the other end of the phone who makes me walk through the basic steps to make sure it really is broken, rather than a tech who goes "Thanks for calling MS... it doesn't work?... ok, we'll send you a new one. Bye!". The former is a sign of a company that hires decent people to do their job well, the latter is a sign of a company that hires any schmuck off the street and then rewards him for having a 2 minute call length average.

And, speaking as someone who had to argue with 3 different techs at Telus to convince them that there was actually something called a "Default Gateway", and no, it wasn't a proprietary setting for the device I was connecting, and no, it wasn't 192.168.0.1 ... I'll take competent techs who make me check the basics any day.

All that said, he does sound like he got a bad batch. TFA mentions he bought the majority at one time, which could be a reason, but it also mentions that at least 4 of the machines were used in a gaming cafe. Machines take a lot of abuse there, whether you're keeping an eye on them or not, so again, I'm not surprised. Really, a different spin on the article should be "360 owner sends 7 defective units back to MS, MS replaces them and doesn't accuse him of breaking them himself". Really, many hardware vendors I've had to deal with get a little suspicious after you return items for the 3rd or 4th time. I actually had to threaten legal action against a graphic card remanufacturer in order to get them to replace my card after the 4th time their cheap fan died and fried the GPU, out of a batch of 5 I'd purchased.

Compled hardware fails

[Anonymous Coward]

Complex hardware from any manufacturer can fail. Unless you're talking abnormally high percentages I don't think this speaks to the quality of the company behind it.

It's what they DO after the failure that determines a good company in my book. Having to wait 2 weeks for a replacement system sounds absurd!

I had an early November PS3 fail 2 weeks ago (wouldn't detect the HDD sometimes when powering on). Sony overnighted me an empty box to return the unit, paid for overnight return shipping to them, and shipped a replacement to me the day they received it (overnight BTW). Total time was 3 days from when I called their support line.

To me that speaks volumes about the company standing behind the product.

Re:Amount the machines where on

[Brigade]

Exactly what I was thinking. It's almost statistically impossible for him to have purchased, and replaced, THAT many machines, and EVERY one failed on him, all due to faulty machines.

When I was working at Gamestop, people would call ALL the time for tech support for different things. A lot of calls were about overheating 360s .. and most of them had the damn things in a media cabinet. Non-techies don't understand the concept of INTAKE/EXHAUST when it comes to consumer electronics. OR they stick the power brick on carpet.

Believe it or not, I have a launch X360 that has had NO problems (aside from freezing when it was, duh, overheating during certain games - yes I had poor ventilation). Now I have my 360 inside my standing cabinet on the top shelf. I drilled an exhaust hole in the back and attatched an 80mm A/C fan I nabbed from a Sony PS2 Kiosk going in the garbage. I didn't bother with an intake fan (didn't have another fan and the cabinet isn't airtight)

After running my 360 for about 30 hours straight (Viva Pinata achievement) inside the cabinet with the glass door closed, it was still cool to the touch. It's just like the old tech support stories about the coffee cup holder, or the mouse/foot pedal .. a LARGE number of 'faulty machines' are due to plain ignorance or stupidity.

google study is most likely flawed

[sethawoolley]

I used to work at a hardware manufacturer of HPC storage clusters.

Perhaps Google failed to correct for the fact that most modern drive manufacturers simply turn off write verification at high temperature to save energy output, reduce temperature, and thwart drive failure.

When we got drives with firmware that did this, we sent them back, rejected them, and told them not to do tricks with the firmware. It also killed performance at low temperature, and the software we wrote already handled media failure.

Note that we used a heat chamber to detect behavior like this.

Realize that Google doesn't really have the technical competence and experience to deal with a real study. They have no real R&D laboratory. If you get counter-physical results: analyze them with science, not conjecture.

Remember, Google's just an advertising agency. Anything they publish has the ulterior motive of making them look good. They're so blatant, they even don't want people to think they are evil by having a motto of "don't be evil".