XBox Owner Sues Microsoft

drusoicy writes "Reuters is reporting that Sean Burke has filed suit against Microsoft because his XBox system stopped reading discs (games or otherwise) after less than one year of use. Many XBox owners can relate, as XBox hard drives are known for crashing. 'The defective XBox's stop working after minimal usage, after unreasonably, unconscionably, unusually and unexpectedly short amounts of time,' the lawsuit said. The suit will probably become class action, and seeks to represent anyone who has purchased an XBOX since the 2001 launch."

Comments

Have 4 Xboxes...some drives are just crap

[FerretFrottage]

Among the first things an xbox modder does is check out the dvd drive. Generally speaking, the phillips drives are the worse. The thompson drives can be okay, but the samsung drives are considered to be the best because they will allow for the widest reading range of media (cd-r, dc-rw, dvd-r, etc.)

In my experiences, the phillips drives are the hardest to read with, even just slightly scratched or dirty dvds give it problems...the thompson and samsung drives are able to read the same discs with no problems most of the time (some discs are just play unreadble). My thompson drive will read cd-rw disks but only from select media vendors, the samsung drive seems to read everything (hence the reason I've upgrade the 2 phillips drives with samsung drives).

I had one of these drives..

[Recoil_42]

Microsoft fixed mine for free after i complained, but many people have problems with these drives, and i'm very happy that this guy is suing MS.

The problem stems from the Thomson drives used in the Mexican factories -- the chinese factories use Philips and Samsung drives which have no problems, but Thomson drives are notorious for failing in the Xbox community.

Just one look at the official xbox forums reveals hundreds of complaints about dirty disk errors, and on eBay and Xbox parts dealer websites like llamma.com, DVD lasers are the most often sold parts.

From what i understand, the drives themselves aren't really defective -- they're built fine, the problem is that the resistor on the laser is set too high, and as a result, the laser is too weak to read the disks -- thomson drives refuse to read CD-Rs, for that very reason.

Microsoft still won't acknowledge that this problem exists, but over the past few years, they've slowly but surely shifted to using more samsung drives, and less thomson drives, so i'm sure they're at least aware of the problem internally.

My old Mexico-Thomson Xbox works fine now after the repairs -- they replaced the drive with another thomson, which has given me no problems since. But it still doesn't read CD-Rs, whereas my Chinese-built Philips xbox has no qualms whatsoever reading the crappiest of CD-Rs..

Re:Why can't he just return it?

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Nope. 90 days is all Microsoft gives you against defects.