Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
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.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
Your polling method, that is.
I don't own an xbox360, and nothing is keeping me from skewing your sample.
Had one, started freezing. Took it back to gamestop, got an all new one. That started freezing. Took it back and got a third one.
::crosses fingers::
Running solid for two weeks so far
In an open space with good airflow (I have an old switched-AT power supply with two fans hooked up to it...one pushing air in, one sucking it out the back...both laying up against the box, so no I have not opened any of the ones that I have.)
Living With a Nerd
My family has two Xbox 360's, both of which are functioning.
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.
8==8 Bones 8==8
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.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Mine broke after 5 months. 3 red lights.. This was before they extended the warranty. Luckily I had the warranty from Best Buy and I now have a Wii and a DS..
I've only had my box for about 6 months, but so far it's been working fine. It's crashed twice in that 6-month period, and in both cases a restart set it right again.
Even with all the different DVD drives, the original xbox was pretty solid. The 360 OTOH is the first console I ever had which failed (DVD failure ~9 months). I skipped the PS2 but a friend had that fail as well.
Broken. And it wasn't an Xbox 360; it was a Wii. Once its fan failed, even 20 watts was too much for the heat sink alone to dissipate, and it turned itself off after 30 minutes.
Broken, over 1 year old, Microsoft replaced without any hassle. Shipped me back a replacement unit instead of repairing.
My Xbox has problems with the drive aswell, it often sticks when i push the eject button. I have to physically push on the bay door to get it to open. =/
though i havnt followed up with any kind of replacement, simply because its not worth the shipping. but it still scares me that down the road i will have to deal with the drive just completely not working any longer.
but there is this... i do however find the 360 to be my favorite of all the systems. its the most user friendly imo, and has the simplest/most efficent UI. its not complicated but not to basic either...
i bought a Wii then sold it. i just wish microsoft had the hardware to back the software. =/
Running for months, multi-hour sessions, cramped entertainment center: feelin' fine.
*knocks on his wooden desk*
see subject
They ran a gaming center. How many hours a day where the machines on? Where they in cabinets? These are a huge factors.
Still that is a lot of failures.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
Still on my launch 360, running perfectly fine still, fans make a bit of noise for the first 3 minutes or so on power up just like my comp does so no irregularities there. I have played tons of games on it for really long time periods (sometimes leaving console on, paused, overnight). Only once i got a 3 red light error because my cable became unplugged from my 360 partly.
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'll take competent techs who make me check the basics any day.
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
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.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Died after 5 months. I just got #2 last week.
Agreed.
I've modded / repaired quite a few of both ps2 and xbox. I believe the xbox had superior hardware.
The first few versions of ps2 drives had quite a few problems with the dvd drives. (Crap lasers, you could fix it temporarly by adjusting the pot, but that only saved you a few months)
The thomson xbox drives were really bad too.
n/t
And it wasn't an Xbox 360; it was a Wii. Once its fan failed, even 20 watts was too much for the heat sink alone to dissipate, and it turned itself off after 30 minutes.
My Gamecube died the same way after 5 years. It didn't shut itself off, it just started crashing. Didn't take long to figure out why. I think it suffered some damage (partly because I tried using a box fan next to the intake opening as a low-rent replacement so that I could finish a boss fight in Baten Kaitos... too bad it didn't last long enough to get to a save point), because after I replaced the fan it suffered from disk read failures and it never had before the fan failed.
Sucks that your fan in your Wii would die so soon. I hope it turning itself off means it will still work when the fan is replaced -- not important when its under warranty, but at the 5 year mark.
The enemies of Democracy are
TSIA
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I disagree with your testing methodology - such a survey is inherently biased and self-selecting towards those who own Xbox 360 consoles, broken or not.
So in the interests of balance, I wish to report that I do not own an Xbox 360 games console. Or any other console, for that matter. However, this does mean that I have not personally encountered any problems with the Xbox 360's alleged unreliability!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
Also, this poll is stupid.
Comment of the year
I bought a Wii! ;-)
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
Not broken
sounds like half the units I sell at Best Buy...... An entire shipment was bad...bout 20-30 units....poor guy that found out...he would get one home and come right back happened multiple times till we finally started opening them at the store. And this was right out of the box.
I bought a a launch unit and it wouldn't play games one time out of two. Instead of launching the game, it would read the DVD-movie part of the disk that says "This is a 360 game, put this in a 360" or something to that effect. So I returned my unit, got a complete refund (except for the game, got 40$ of my 70$ back... stupid store policy). Then I waited for GRAW to come out in March, walked into a store and bought one from the shelves. Has been working fine since then, tough I did experience a couple of disk errors while playing GRAW and Oblivion, but not from other games, so I blame the disks, not the console.
I've had a handful of freezes while playing games on disks, but the Ninety Nine Nights demo would almost ALWAYS lock up after 10-30 minutes of play, regardless of how long the console had been turned off. Tried clearing the 360 game/patch cache, but it didn't fix the problem. The retail version of the game doesn't have this problem, tough it did hang once or twice during the whole compaign (Can't beat that stupid last boss tough. grrrr...)
I'm dissapointed about the hangs, but they are so few and far appart that I'm just not going to bother with returning the unit now and wait until my 2 year extra warranty (on top of the 1 year) is almost over. Then I'll call support and get a replacement. By then I suppose the hardware will have all the problems fixed. Maybe I'll be lucky and get one of those with the silent DVD drives, who knows?
Disk drive about 3 months in. MS replaced it for free.
Just got it back. My original started crashing more often and then wham...3 Red Lights of Death. The replacement seems to be working ok...but I have only been on it for a few hours.
Cowboy Neal :-)
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.
My launch-day 360 has been home TWICE. But my warranty was extended after the second time until late Sept. 07, and I believe I got a new system after the second time. Service has been good. Don't pretend PS2s didn't and PS3s won't break.
Not broken, Midnight Launch 360. Used to freeze during long sessions until I set up proper ventilation in the cabinet it was sitting in. (DUH .. so it wouldn't recirculate the hot air it was pumping out back through the intake)
Recently purchased an XBox 360; first one I got, I brought it home from Circuit City, hooked it up, and got the three lights. Tried removing the hard drive, checked the power brick (led was green), etc etc, after four tries each with the lights 0222 I think the error code was (using the flashing indicator method, seeing how it never got picture out to the TV or my Monitor). Bad graphics card.
Took it back the next day, got a replacement, no problem with this second one, though I've only had it for 2 weeks.
Rentals have high failure rates? Who would have thought!
/. it doesn't have to be smart, interesting, to the point or sometimes even factual, I just have to come up with something that makes MS look bad! And don't you start "welcome to slashdot n00b!" ;)
20 min call for troubleshooting before RMA? Preposterous! Dell is always taking me at least 3 hours, MS techs must by lazy.
On another note it becomes more and more clear that in order to get something posted on
Our release day console had an incomplete controller (battery pack missing a terminal) so it was unusable. Though, technically the console has had no problems. My personal console runs, but it won't play Gears of War without an Internet connection (I don't have broadband at home *gasp*), so it doesn't really work.
I think those kinda even out to one broken, one not broken.
The article states the guy bought at least 4 of the units at launch, Microsoft has already made it clear there was a problem with a lot of launch units so is it really any suprise that this has happened? One replacement failed again but it doesn't state if this was one that was replaced earlier on and hence could be prone to the same fault.
Don't get me wrong it does indeed suck for the guy and it is a bit silly of MS to release with these problems (surely they must have known?) but the article sounds like it's trying to make something of an issue that's now largely done and dusted. It's a little like someone claiming they had 8 Wii motes all bought at release and that the straps all broke, perfectly realistic scenario but let's face it, is and issue that's now been and gone.
First one got wierd (kept losing profiles, corrupting game saves), swapped both xbox360 and HD.
;-)
Second one (after one month) stopped reading/recognising games and giving disc errors/disc unreadable.
Still we figure if this one dies in 6 months we can get one of the mk2 cooler running 360's as a replacement
Oh and if you're in the UK HMV *rocks* for replacements if it all goes pete tong.
Looks like the apologists are out in force, defending up a storm!
Can't wait to see what people here will start posting once the same problem hits the PS3; expecting a 360*0.5 degree turn here....
Not had it that long though. And don't play it a lot.
At least when these systems are on they have fans running to remove the heat. Try running a Wii with Wiiconnect24 mode on for a while.
The "standby" mode of the Wii is really nice for downloading news and stuff while you're not using the system but the trade off is a really hot Wii that has warped the bottom of the plastic and cooks discs left in the system. I've turned mine off until I can get a response from Nintendo about it. It still plays games with no problems but the plastic case has been damaged from the heat.
Here is a link to an overheated Wii story.
Err...in the immortal words
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
it was supposedly something to do with that huge power cable.
My first broke after 6 months and my second is making funny noises after 2 months...it's gonna go too...thanks Best Buy warranty!
I've had mine since early february 2006. I haven't had any problems whatsoever.
got it at launch. flawless since.
:)
even plugged it in at work and got an electrical spike and it's worked fine.
+ i love it
We've got massive influxes of them coming into where I work for repair, usually for firmware upgrades and faulty optical drives.
Not often, we do get one or two in with bad system boards, and we basically rebuild the damned thing. (Well, not me, I work in HP, not the icrosoft department, but word gets around fast enough in repair depots!)
One board actually fried itself due to shotty capacitors. That was a lovely smell to have float to my nose, not.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Not any I owned. Have replaced three original Xbox drives so far. However, I always bought the cheapest one. They were only $25, so that may have something to do with it. I did have to replace one PS2 drive right away, but that one has lasted a good 5 years now. I have yet to have any xbox drive last 2 years.
Actually the button that opens the cd drive is stuck in such a way that it cannot be pressed at all.
The solution, removed the casing to both the xbox and cd-drive, and lift the cd cover to swap out games...
To most consumers that would be considered broken I guess.
09:F9:11:02 - 9D:74:E3:5B - D8:41:56:C5 - 63:56:88:C0
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".
Perfectly fine.
I find it pretty funny the lame excuses Microsoft's army of fanboys are making for the consoles very poor relibility... There is a poll here: http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?p=43 63999#post4363999
Showing 50% of 360 owners are on at least their 2nd console... Yet Microsoft continue to lie, and say failure rates are within industry standards...
If your Wii cooks discs in Wiiconnect24 mode, it's broken. My Wii has been running in Wiiconnect24 since I bought it the day it came out, and it is only slightly warm to the touch if I'm not playing games.
While playing Halo, I reach over and grab at my Russian-genotyped girlfriend's Muffin, and the Muffin eats my hand! When that happens, I drop the XBox controller and the Halo habbit to don the rubber gloves for an excavation of my hand from my girlfriend's Muffin. It was removed, but it felt so warm in there that I wanted to put my hand back inside the Muffin. Can you say that about your XBox muffins, that would so much as scorch your hand if ever touched while in that breeder reactor of a console?
Use your imagination guys. My Russian Bride has one chipper Muffin that is hungry for my manly-hand meat. There is one thing that the XBox Easy-Bake oven trumps over my girlfriend's muffin, and that is the Xbox muffins don't need to be shaved. My girlfriend's Muffin is all hairy, somtimes with lint, but at-least I don't need to add any salt and it is pre-moistened with a savor greater than butter.
Surprisingly, every dinner-event I've attended all the participants intend I take my girlfriend out of my pant-pocket so they could shake her. I wish they would stop treating my girlfriend like just any left-hand; she's the one with the stamina damnit! She must stay ready in her little pocket, and let Righty do all the greeting for both of us.
This is truly headline news because here I thought they were a beacon for stability and trustworthiness.
At least on /., the Google study is getting all of the press. But there were two large studies on disk failures this year at FAST: the one by Google, and the other by the Carnegie Mellon Parallel Data Lab. It won best paper. You can find it at http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/Failure/failure-fas t07_abs.html
Although the CMU group didn't have environmental data to see what correlations there were, they get results similar to Google in other areas; e.g. that drive "vintage" matters, the failures are not a Poisson distribution, etc. Since the two studies agree, it implies that both are reliable. Also, most people *don't* have a heat chamber to weed out flaky firmware behavior--the drives that almost everybody runs are drives that may have such firmware games enabled. The studies are on disk drives *as they are shipped from the manufacturer*; the correlations found, whatever their reasons, do exist.
...had always been prone to locking up though. It was a first run unit. MS initially charged me for a repair, and sent me a new one. A couple months later, a check for more than they had charged for the repair showed up in my mailbox. The new machine has been fine for about a year.
I'm willing to cut them some slack on a first productuion run, especially since they took good care of me when I had a problem. I guess I'm just a data point on the other end of the bell curve from the poor guy who went through 7 consoles.
so... running in open air... 70 degs + ambient temp in the xb0x... maybe what 150 deg?
in a cabinet, what, raise the temp another 50 deg (F) ????
ok, but, PCBs, silicon, metal, even Solder, don't have problems with this small a temperature fluctuation...
People stop saying every is "ruining their xboxes" by putting them in cabinets or having bad airflow...
just cause it makes your skin feel uncomfortable doesn't mean the silicon/solder/PCB is "hurting" inside... they can withstand much higher temps...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
I've had two systems break!
Bought mine at Best Buy in July 06, first one died i October, fortunatley I paid best buy a extra $50 for thier coverage and just took back the Base and the power supply and got one in mins, that one died last week I am currently on my 3rd.
PS3 i bout the same coverage but that was in january so theres still time for it to die. (better not!)
This isn't home use. This is a gaming center. Let's consider likely properties of a gaming center:
A couple of weeks ago, there was an article about how small third parties were getting a new tech out to the gulf far faster and cheaper than military procurement ever could. The point being that consumer grade vs. military grade implies a whole hell of a lot less ruggedizing, fault testing, etc. It's all a great time and cost saving - until the consumer unit fails and someone dies because of it where the slow, expensive military unit wouldn't have.
The same goes for individual vs. commercial use. A home console only needs to be so robust before it's good enough for home use. That same quality, when used in a commercial setting, is always going to fall down.
It's the same with cheap consumer cameras that'll get maybe 10,000 shutter actions and are tested for 50,000 - they are completely unsuitable for pros who know they'll be shooting a couple of hundred thousand shots.
The 360 is a home gaming system. It is not a well sealed, properly ventilated, secure, unit that's designed for all day, every day, month after month use.
Though that does raise the question as to whether Microsoft should release a $5,000 variant with a carousel disk loading mechanism that can only be stocked via a lockable panel, plenty of ventilation, sealing, etc. in a very large box and call it the commercial version, invalidating the warranties on guys like this who buy home versions and use them commercially.
Almost everyone I know is, like me, on their second or third PS2. My most recent is a slimline, don't know what revision, but in less than 4 months it was already having trouble. As someone has said before, even if the PS3 was going for half price, they'll have to put one hell of a warranty on it before I'll even consider one. No doubt many others feel the same, and not just those who were part of the class action lawsuit. Sony sullied their reputation long before the whole PS3 mess.
My Dreamcast STILL works, even though it's had a relatively hard life reading many discs that have files in improper order (pretty much any non-authentic game).
I am on my 3rd, my brother is on his second. Both of us have our original xbox1 systems and they both still work. Coincedence? Quality took the back seat over timely launch, it is obvious to me.
My new 360 works fine but I'm little puzzled over disc read errors that it picks up sometimes (and the awful sounds coming from the drive when I use it vertically). I thought it might be my drive but most games run fine and the ones the don't (Dead Rising, for example) seem to have a history of this problem...is there a good reason for this? Is the manufacturing for the disc different for this game?
mine is in working order and has been since we got february of last year I believe.
At first, I thought that people were completely exaggerating the failure rate just to make MS look bad, etc, whatever reason. I bought my 360 in March 2006, and in Jan 2007, I got the dreaded red ring of death. I called MS up and got mine repaired for free. It's pretty funny that they actually have a menu option for if you're seeing the red ring of death. This kind of suggested this problem was slightly more widespread than I previously thought. All said and done, I was without a working Xbox for ~3 weeks, including all shipping delays.
Approx a year after I purchased my 360, everyone else who I know (5 or 6 people) have all gotten the red ring of death and had to replace theirs. And no, none of them are sitting in an enclosed entertainment center, etc. The power brick is properly placed and has plenty of buffer space around it and whatnot. I'd really love if MS would actually say what the problem is that causes this red ring.