The Man Who Went Through 11 Xbox 360s

1up is carrying the sad story of Justin Lowe. Just your average gamer, wanting to partake of the current generation of consoles. He's got a PSP, DS, PS3, and a 360. He really likes his 360 ... which is probably a good thing, since he's sent 11 of them back to Microsoft. He's now on his twelfth. The piece covers Justin's ongoing plight, and discusses Microsoft's claims of hardware failures being a 'vocal minority'. "Justin has not had a working system for longer than a month or two. The list of problems is almost comically large: three red lights of death, two with disc read errors, two dead on arrival, several with random audio and video-related issues and one that actually exploded. Looking at the situation through Moore's own standards, how has Microsoft performed? 'On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate them an 8... at first,' says Lowe. His [first] 360 broke in early January, just a few weeks after purchase."

Comments

Re:OS carrying over?

[jollyreaper]

Back several years ago I switched to Linux because I was getting over 10 Blue Screens of Death from XP.... is this maybe a reflection of that level of quality (or lack thereof) translating from M$ software to hardware, considering M$ has really not built quality software products? Here's an anecdote from a sample of two. I've been the casual computer geek, not liking Windows but running it since that's where the games are. A friend of mine has always been real nerdcore, never into gaming but massively into programming and serious applications. In other words, he's not the kind of idiot who goes about breaking things through tinkering and ignorance. Between the two of us, I would be the one you'd expect to see having squirrely Windows problems.

How did it really turn out? He was reinstalling Windows once a month. Didn't matter which computer he ran it on, what he did with it, a reinstall once a month. He had the Win95 key memorized. He switched to Linux in hopes of better stability but even got burned there. In desperation, he tried Macs and the mysterious problems went away.

I have no reasonable explanation for it. I've heard about funny crap happening with bio-electric fields and unexpected interactions with electronics and I'm not just talking about electrostatic discharge. I don't have any proof of it but I'm wondering if he just had a field strong enough to make Wintel cry.

Anyone else have any stories of weird crap like that?

Asus is bad, I got a board with sperm on it...

[JAB Creations]

I did RMAs with Asus on a socket 939 with SLI16X chipset. The second board (at the end of the second RMA) had sperm on it. Also as a side note none of the socket 939 nForce4 boards I've used are actually capable of running raid 1. I went to EVGA and while I still couldn't do raid 1 I decided to get a RocketRaid 2300 and it works fine now. If I buy a new anything and receive a used part as a replacement I will *NOT* do business with that company EVER again, period. Especially with computer components I've got plenty of choices with companies. My favorite motherboard manufacturer is Gigabyte though I was sorely disappointed that they opted to jump on the worthless AM2 train instead of release an SLI-16X chipset based board. I won't be using a new socket for a long time with DDR3 coming out now on Intel and AMD catching up...screw that, my DDR-400 works just fine. When I do go for a new socket I'll probably decide based on dual-graphics cards based chipset...though hopefully (but doubtfully) we won't be forced to choose a chipset by then. Anyway don't buy Asus unless you want to risk having to RMA and receive sperm covered motherboards.