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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.
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.
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
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.
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".