Slashdot Mirror
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."
I am on my second PS3 after the first had a firmware update which is claimed completed. Went to reboot and the system just hangs. Ended up sending it back to Sony and the shipped me a different one. So even though it wasn't a hardware issue, things happen.
No problems with the Wii yet, runs like a champ.
Other than all being Xbox360s, what else do they all have in common? Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes? Or, perhaps, he has some seriously bad karma.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
There are probably environmental factors going on here. I'm not a gamer, but several friends who are have had no problems with their Xbox360 hardware.
Where the hell is he playing with these systems, the tub?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Vocal Minority my ball sack.
I had the three blinking red lights (first example voice prompt on the 360 support line!), and they proceeded to lose my freakin' Xbox. After two weeks of "here's your reference number, call back in a few days" I finally got a voicemail saying that they have the shipping reference . . . but they didn't, you know, leave the fucking reference number.
They sure seem overwhelmed given that they claim to have a below-industry-standard failure rate.
-Peter
The article (yes, I RTFA) seems to point the blame at Microsoft and say, "See! See! They're shipping with an extra heat-sink! It MUST be all their fault!"
I have 20+ friends with 360s, and none of them have experienced problems with their 360s. I have a hard time believing disc read errors, separate audio and visual problems, DOA and exploding consoles are ALL caused by the lack of a heatsink. Like a customer that comes back to PetsMart with dead fish after dead fish, I have trouble believing after 8 dead fish that ALL of the problem is PetsMart selling defective fish.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I understand that with so many people reporting problems, someone is surely going to have eleven bad units, and I don't doubt that he did.
But what is the probability of this happening to a given person, assuming, say, a 5% overall failure rate? (ignoring the "RMA pool effect" which makes you more likely to get a bad unit back)
And given the number sold so far, assuming people don't just give up and junk or sell the thing when the warranty runs out, what percentage of failure rate is needed for two or three people to have gone through 11 bad units?
(I slept through statistics in college, but I did learn enough to know that you can compute this kind of stuff, and compute the error factor too.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
wow! this guy must has alot of patience, I would get berserk by the third one and smash the dam thing against the wall, would that void my warranty?
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?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I buy my consoles at Sam's Club or Wal-Mart. Broken 360? Drive to the store and exchange it. Not happy about getting 5th broken 360? Drive to the store and get my money back. No waiting for Microsoft to ship a working unit. No worrying about receiving a refurbished unit to replace the broken one (Some companies do this. Not sure about Microsoft). I personally came to this epiphany when people were discussing PSP dead pixel policies at several different retailers. People who bought from Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Costco or Target just took them back for exchange/refund. Costco is too far away and Target usually has a shorter return window so I'll go to Wal-Mart or Sam's.
In fact, I have proof: http://slashdot.org/~Stickerboy/friends/
When I first read this, Slashdot's quote at the bottom of the page said:
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
The odds are just way to low for all those broken Xboxes being manufacturing faults. Even if 10% of all Xboxes Microsoft ships are faulty (which they aren't) the odds of getting eleven in a row is 0.1^11 = some really extremely super-duper small number. You are much more likely to win the lotterly many times in a row than that happening. The reason why he gets all the bad Xboxes must lie somewhere else. The delivery company might handle them badly. Poor Justin might live in an extremely dusty house with lots of cats and dogs. The power network in his area might have severe problems with power spikes. All more plausible explanations than eleven factory errors in a row.
Football Odds
2nd one keeps working, though I don't play it as much as a kid would. Using three separate - and each critical - fans for venting heat is unbelievably boneheaded stupid. As was placing the DVD-ROM drive right above the hard disk. But, as a PS3 owner too, I have to admit that the damn thing has the games. And it plays them well. Dead Rising and Gears were worth the price alone. And Command and Conquer has been just silly amounts of fun. I'd say that unless you really want Blu-Ray for movies, the 360 (with an extended warranty) is more than enough horsepower, and has the better games to boot.
Not that anyone would really want to buy the sickly animals from a major pet store retailer, that promotes the often times cruel breeding practices used to supply purse dogs and such...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
My Wii ran fine out of the box, but a friend of mine had to send her Wii back to Nintendo- some of the first batch of Wiis had some defect (I can't remember the details). This doesn't even include the stonger straps they had to add after some people broke theirs. Not to rip on Nintendo, just pointing out that it's nearly impossible to make perfect software/hardware.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Damn, wish I had modpoints on this story.
Like a customer that comes back to PetsMart with dead fish after dead fish, I have trouble believing after 8 dead fish that ALL of the problem is PetsMart selling defective fish.
Curses! Foiled again!
-Aquaman
More Twoson than Cupertino
You do realize that if the failure rate was 5% there would be an excellent chance that you could know that many people that have a 360 and have no issues, right?
Even the anecdotal evidence doesn't add up. There are too many stories out there about people with dead 360s relative to the stories about other systems for this to be a non-issue. Personally, I know six people with 360s, and all but one of them have had to send at least one back. It's not the one guy who went through 11, or 14, or whatever that concern me. It's the many, many stories of the guys who have had to send one or two back.
I troubleshoot home theater electronics all day, every day. I have to wonder if something else is at work here. At least one person asked, what do these eleven units all have in common? The same working environment. There are plenty of Xbox 360s out there, and they certainly all aren't failures, and the chance that this one person has received every part from the 1-2% of doomed 360s out there that are failures would be nearly statistically impossible.
More likely is that some other factor is causing this, perhaps the powerstrip he's plugged it into has a badly grounded outlet, or perhaps the main outlet itself - or possibly any of another hundred or so electrical issues there could be - such issues tend to plague complex electronics in very odd ways, and not the same way every time.
If I were at Microsoft, I'd replace his unit, but advise this guy he needs to get some help looking for what other factors could be causing these malfunctions.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
A friend of mine rolled 5 natural 20s in a row once, followed by a 19.
This isn't the hate-filled microsoft bashing I came here to read, damnit.
I used to work at Western Digital in their support area and we saw the same thing happen to a tiny minority of users. I'm not excusing Microsoft for it, but for some reason it seems to happen to every company. We'd have someone have a head crash, 2 DOA's, 1 week working then dead, etc. It was strange but there was really nothing we could do about it. 99% of our replacement orders went out and worked flawlessly with no hiccups in the process but for whatever reason there's a certain percentage that are doomed for multiple failures.
The real tragedy here is that Microsoft management didn't catch this case long before this and flag it as a priority fix case - send him a new machine, have someone deliver it to his house, whatever it takes to get the problem fixed. The cost of doing that is FAR less than the cost of fixing the amount of bad publicity this will generate.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
It will be a vacuum cleaner.
GET OUT MORE!
Odds of getting 11 Failed XBox360s given a 5% failure rate: 1 in 20^11 or 204,800,000,000,000 (204 Trillion). If we assume a 10% failure rate we have 1 in 10^11 or 10,000,000,000 (10 Billion). Given that there are only about 12 Million units sold, and assuming that this guy was the least lucky person, but there were no enviromental hazards killing his 360s (which is a dangerous assumption), We can estimate a failure rate of about 23%. The error rate and confidence ranges will need to wait until another post.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Quote that may help him "The only consistent feature of your dissatisfying relationships is you." What else in your life do you break, buddy-pal-friend-o-mine?
He probably has the thing in a hot spot, like on top of a big CRT monitor, in an enclosed space, in a location with air vents blocked, or next to a hot air vent. We know the XBox 360 has marginal cooling.
Work once gave me a laptop with a touchpad that went nuts whenever I tried to use it. The mouse would jump all of the screen while randomly clicking. It was completely unusable. Nobody else had the problems.
One day I discovered that I could hold my finger about and inch above the pad and by concentrating I could make the mouse start clicking repeatedly. I never could get it to move though. And I couldn't really control the clicking -- just turn the repeated clicking on or off.
They can smell fear.
If you are a novice user alone with a machine it will crash, just to taunt you.
However, if a confident tech support person is watching, it will know not to crash.
Remember, your computer HATES you, and wants nothing less than your total mental destruction, meatbag.
You can work out some basic stats by adding and multiplying the numbers together.
.... 11 times
If you want the chance of something and something else happening, then you multiply the two numbers. If you want one or the other then you add them together.
The chances of 11 failures at a 5% random failure rate?
0.05 * 0.05 * 0.05
Basically, it isn't random, not even with MS. Someone's fucking over the machines.
Deleted
I admire his staying power. If a product proves to be that defect ridden I start getting pissed off the second time it breaks. If the third one went I'd probably ask for a refund and go buy a different console. Or, if I'm really pissed off, I ask the manufacturer of the defective product for a refund and a wii. Make them buy it. Just grind that humiliation in there...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Always put the box on a hard surface.
If you've gotta lay it on a carpeted floor,
put a book or a magazine under it to get the
bottom of the box up out of the carpet.
Don't let dust accumulate in the vent holes
or fans -- use a vacuum to suck it clean every
once in a while.
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
I'm sure I'll get flamed to heck for this, but really, MS should be praised for this.
Really, honestly, if a customer bought something, then brought it back broken, 11 FREAKING TIMES in a row, do you really think most retailers would keep accepting it back, over and over again? Eventually they'd be blaming it on you and refusing to take it back. Instead, MS doesn't seem to care much that this guy has the worlds worst mean failure rate, and aside from getting him to check his wiring, they keep sending him new ones without much question. My personal experience just trying to return my malfunctioning video card twice (well, the first time was the repair return, the second time was because they sent me back the exact same physical card, without repairing it first) tells me that most retailers are complete asshats, and will happily blame you if they can possibly get away with it.
Many other retailers would cut you off or make you start paying, and you wouldn't really have much success complaining "hey, I broke my xbox 10 times in a row, and now they won't send me a replacement for free!". MS keeps pumping them out. They get a +1 in my book for that.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'd say it's more likely the Mac was protecting him from himself, which is something Windows and Linux don't necessarily do. When I programmed on my MS machine, and installed lots of software, I had to reinstall all the damn time. Now? Every year and a half or so. I program a lot on Linux machines, but I'm super careful, and I always run as a user, not a superuser...Still, I've screwed 'em up a few times, just dicking around with non-standard libraries and custom compiles.
Mac? You just don't have those issues. Mac software installs are hilarious if you're used to Windows. It doesn't expose it's system files in userland, and it hides superuser access altogether.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Mac? You just don't have those issues. Mac software installs are hilarious if you're used to Windows. It doesn't expose it's system files in userland, and it hides superuser access altogether. I suppose that's possible. He's also become a virtual machine evangelist these days. "Crashie, crashie, my buggy little machine. I don't care, I've got a clean version of you backed up!" he'd cackle. Yah, computer geeks are the hatters of the 21st century, I'm just not sure what's serving as our mercury. Maybe Mountain Dew production has been outsourced to China?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Do you have a pacemaker or something like that?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Well... He's got a friend now.
The replacements were refurbished broken X-boxes in the first place, which didn't get the same quality of service check on the way out the door as a new one might.
Who's to say, but it would explain why the replacements have been buggy, where a new one might not be.
Then again, maybe they were all new.
Puppy mills are a large problem, but at least at the PetSmart locations in the D.C. area they don't sell cats or dogs. They do have cats from local shelters there for adoption, though. There's a fee, but AFAIK this goes to the group running the shelter not anyone who bred the dogs.
There are, however, many other pet stores that do sell dogs from puppy mills. Also, I've gotten fish from PetSmart that had ick, so I'm hardly saying that all their animals are healthy or well taken care of.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Consider the fact that there have been at least three separate, major problems with the X-Box 360 hardware and that these have been fairly widespread, (especially in Europe and other non-US markets where problem items are sometimes "dumped"). Then factor in MS's policy (since changed), of replacing the brand new X-Box 360 you purchased with a refurbished item. Add to that the fact that MS has actually changed the design of the X-Box 360 at least once or twice in it's very short lifetime on the market, specifically to address hardware issues, and it really is no surprise what is happening here.
This fellow was unlucky enough to get one of the marginal units from the original shipments from the factory. The first two or three replacements were refurbished (i.e. - probably suffering form the same fault.), and likely were also from the original production runs of the product. This would make the first three or four failures out of eleven due to simple poor QA from Microsoft compounded by the foolish and underhanded policy of sending out refurbished replacements. All of a sudden the possibility of eleven failures makes more sense.
To those who are claiming that it's the user or his household electrical supply that is at fault, the original article contains this: When his third 360 broke, one customer service rep suggested he look into the wiring at his house; electricity problems could have been causing the mess-ups. Problem: none of his other systems (not to mention his several computers and other electronics) have experienced any major problems, and his father is, coincidentally, an electrician. The specific suggestion was brought up by Microsoft customer service again after the eighth console repair. This time, just to be certain, Justin had a contractor come to the house and check the wiring, where he was told that everything was in order, with no abnormalities in voltage of any of house outlets. Nevertheless, customer service has continued to suggest this as a potential cause. Some people have also suggested that he might have the X-Box "on a rug" or not adequately ventilated or something but this is a hardcore gamer with multiple gaming units, surely he would not be wrapping the thing in a blanket or anything, and short of that, the console should work as advertised.
I am sick of folks defending MS's crap hardware with statements like: "Oh, he should have it on a table all by itself with 14 inches of clearance around the fans and possibly a room fan pointing at it as well. Then it will work fine." WTF?
A product should just work when any reasonable person uses it in a reasonable way which it seems the fellow did.
Get this guy an Exorcist.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Has to be the delivery guy. The kid probably gave him some slack and now the guy takes his xbox packages out to a field with a baseball bat.
Was your friend into overclocking, perhaps?
I have this strange thing happen to me where street lights will turn off when I walk by them. Not 100% (or even close to that), but it is an alarmingly large percentage...I'd guess around 5%.
I have the opposite happen to me with computers vs your friend. When other people have problems with computers, the problems will mysteriously disappear when I sit in front of the computer.
Blame the individual? Because MS has never (sarcasm) shipped faulty product before. The list of symptoms listed in the article were all different, and in a couple of cases, the replacement game box showed up DOA. How is that his fault?
I find it disheartening that it is becoming more and more common for the human individual to be marginalized. According to few friends of mine who have lived and worked in China, the value of the human individual over there has been the subject of massive propaganda designed to make sure everybody knows that they are without value, easily replaced and should shut up and be happy with whatever the government gives them. Do we want that same level of repression here? I don't.
Why people voluntarily spread the kind of sick message around today which puts humans last is just plain aggravating. MS should bloody well be hauled over the coals for producing broken product and for dropping the ball repeatedly in their shoddy attempts to fix the problem. But instead we see Slashdotters actually siding with MS, an organization which has been found guilty numerous times in numerous ways for lousy and morally repugnant business practice.
Hello? Don't people see the disconnect here?
-FL
Your argument is reasonable, but it rests on the assumption that the events (XBox 360 failures) are uncorrelated. When you send back a defective unit, does MS send you a brand new one drawn from the same pool as the ones that get sold in the store, or do they send you a refurbished one? If it's the latter and the failure rate for refurbished units is higher than for new units (which seems at least plausible), then effectively the failure of the subsequent devices is correlated with the failure of the first and your calculation is not accurate.
Still, either the failure rate is quite high for refurbished models, it's pretty high for new models, or there's some environmental factor causing the failure (introducing additional correlation) in this particular case.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
I've crashed a mac before. It was one of the most bizarre experiences I've ever had. It was on an iMac at the local university, and I was trying to copy files between two of my flash drives when all of a sudden the mac equivalent of the BSOD flashed over my screen. In four different languages, it told me that I needed to power down my computer. After booting, everything was fine, except one of my thumb drives was now read only. Except there's no data on it, nor any apparent way to format it or change the read only status (at least from windows).
Looking back, I think I may have unplugged a scanner without dismounting it and then plugged one of the flash drives into that port. User error strikes again!
Are you sure it isn't a 4^8^15^16^23^42 chance?
..
Okay, I miss Lost.
Quack, quack.
This is who repairs the UK 360s that die. They have stopped repairing all 360s that come to them that have the red ring of death because they've concluded that the system board is flawed and that "fixing" a system with another flawed system board is not a solution. They have contacted Microsoft asking for a real solution with no response.
Taking bets on how long the EU will force Microsoft to do a full and total recall on the 360.
I took care of my Xbox 360, I really did. I kept the unit and its power supply in separate, well-ventilated areas. I dusted it every couple of months. I was gentle with the CD tray. You can probably see where this is going... So yesterday -- one month after my warranty expired -- my Xbox 360 shows the dreaded "ring of death". Cost to have it swapped out with a refurbished unit: $140. I'm starting to think that the 360 and the PS3 are actually the same price, you just pay for the Xbox over time. My solution: throw it away. I gave my peripherals to deserving friends, am selling my games, and tore the unit apart to salvage the muffin fans. (Do you know the muffin fan? The muffin fan? The muffin fan! Who lives... oh nevermind.) "Krikey," you say, "isn't that a bit extreme?" Perhaps. But there are so few compelling games for either of the 'next generation' systems that I actually feel somewhat relieved to be off the train. Here's one fewer customer for the rehash parade.
Rudimentary statistics tells us that if you have a 1 in 10,000,000 probability of having 11 broken XBox systems in a row (and the probability of each XBox 360 system being broken is equal) than the probability of an individual XBox 360 system breaking would be (1/10,000,000) to the 11th root ...
...
...
This works out to being 23%
If you assume that Microsoft is remarkably unlucky and the odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000 the probability (1 in 1,000) of an individual XBox 360 being broken would be 12%
Even if you assume that Microsoft is the least lucky company in the world and the odds are 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 (1 in 1,000,000) the probability of an individual XBox 360 breaking would be 6.5%
The reasonable assumption is that the XBox 360 is failing far more often than Microsoft is willing to admit (likely at 15% to 25%). I'm probably going to get flamed by someone who knows 20 people who haven't had an XBox 360 failure but the probability of that happening (assuming a 25% failure rate) is 1 in 315 which is pretty likely given a large enough sample.
This is exactly what happens. The guy isn't getting brand new 360s every time - he's always getting someone else's problem unit which hasn't had the core problem fixed yet.
My 360 worked fine until my DVD drive stopped working. I sent it off for replacement. The new one I have locks up at least once a day, and after it does, I have to completely power it off *and* switch controllers, as the old one will power the console on, but it will not sync with it. Also, the replacement Xbox had some markings on the casing, and it was louder than my old one (though not excrutiatingly so).
They really would do better to just fix the problem permanently in production, and then start sending out brand new retail units, to help avoid the churn. The more time people spend away from their 360s, the less they'll spend on games and the marketplace.
And while we're at it, I wish they would just get the fuck over their "not invented here" syndrome and adopt Apple's model of iTunes DRM for the Marketplace downloads. Is playing offline really too much to ask for when my console goes tits-up?
I'm counting the days that this thing goes before it finally RRODs on me, and considering that I keep it in immaculate condition (open-air shelving, nothing on top of it, horizontal, I don't fucking move it ever, let alone when there's a game in it), nobody had better fucking tell me that the failure was my fault.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Maybe this guy doesn't actually play them. He has Robot Wars pitting the systems against each other. PSP and DS are small and maneuverable. The PS3 has that low profile wing cross section. With all those blunt corners the 360 takes the most damage.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
You give MS a bunch of money for a faulty product which they fail to replace with a working one 11 times in a row? That's pathetic. They should be punished, not praised!
The individual is NOT GUILTY and should not be treated as such. --Two of those eleven replacements arrived DOA for goodness sake! The corporation should be giving him a working box AND his money back AND a written apology from the president for wasting his time. They should be getting a -1 in EVERYBODY's book for having such low standards that they were able to produce a huge number of faulty boxes and allow them onto the market. Read the comments; there are several other users who complain that the box is unreasonably delicate.
It has poor cooling, so if I put it on top of my TV or in my video cabinet, (where every other video component in the world has been specifically designed to be placed since the first VCR rolled off the assembly line), it's somehow my fault and I should feel ashamed of myself for not knowing better? That's insane!
When the heck did Corporate America succeed in making people feel guilty and ashamed for asking that Corporate America do it's job?
-FL
Take a look over here. If you have a whole home theater set up (which likely cost thousands of dollars) paying $100-$200 for both a surge suppressor/ power regulator seems pretty reasonable.
With 11M units sold you will need to have a failure rate of 25% to have the probability of 1 guy having 11 failures. So it looks that the failures at this guys house are correlated.
It's easy to blame the victim, that way you don't have to listen to his problem because he asked for it.
It's not likely that XBox failure rates are >20% (as another poster indicated would be necessary to randomly pick 11 successive failures). It's probably something much simpler like a repair division, refurbishing returned machines and shipping them as replacements. Such a strategy looks good from a business point of view, as you get to "recover" some of cost of failed hardware. However, should the diagnosis be wrong or incomplete, or if the repair center lacks the resources of the production center, your return will be substantially less reliable than a new machine.
Perhaps he chain smokes and his long haired dog likes to cuddle the machine for warmth while his apartment shakes as trains pass outside tossing droplets of condensing water from his window air conditioner into he beloved XBox 360 which is struggling to deal with the 118 Volt 66 Hz electricity. That still doesn't mean that he deserves to put up with the hassle of replacing his system 11 times. If the repair centers note excessive dog hair, water exposure, vibrational damage, dropping, etc. they should notify him and not entertain a 12th replacement. The fact that they are still returning replacements without cutting him off implies that they know they have bigger problems than an abusive customer.
I'm not saying that gaming systems needs to be mil-spec, but from the descriptions I've heard, the XBox 360 isn't the most robust machine out there. I doubt that they could ALL be wrong, even with the skweaky wheels making more noise.
- "The article (yes, I RTFA)"
- "I have 20+ friends"
- "...with 360s"
- "...none of them have experienced problems"
And you seriously expect us to bulieve all that?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
One time back in college it happened when I was walking with my girlfriend. I said something to the effect of, "I always feel weird when that happens." She said she'd never had it happen to her before.
The most creepy was when it happened with three consecutive lights. I figured I was about 5 seconds away from being beamed back up to the mothership.
Redundancy is good And also good.
They say that when you return 13 XBox 360's, Bill Gates comes to your house and personally pisses on your shoe.
I don't know about you, but if I had an X-box 360 that needed to be replaced multiple times I would be taking a second look at the environment I (the end user) am putting it in. Perhaps it's too close to my Projector or Surround sound system or PS3 or Exaust vent that dumps heat on the unit. Maybe I have multiple devices stacked, and crammed together too closely. Maybe the port on their surge bar is bad, and not protecting the 360 from flakey power. Maybe I take it to too many lan parties, and it gets knocked around. Perhaps the Shag carpet I wrapped it in (despite giving it a Pimp 70's look) traps in too much heat.
I'm not saying it's all the end user's fault. I'm just saying that the odds of it being all Microsoft's fault are (as you demonstrated above) incredibly unlikely. There has to be a point where a rational person questions these failures and takes it further than "M$ makes Shitty hardware" and starts to look at the environment the system is in to see if/how they are contributing to these failures.
Frankly, I'm not too surprised of his luck considering that MS sends out refurbished machines as replacements. I normally used to think that refurbished electronics were a safe way to save some money, and often times had a few spanking new parts making them more reliable that some alternatives.
Then a friend of mine bought a refurbished xbox (not a 360 though). Thing crapped out. As did it's replacement. And the one after that. After the 3rd, he just gave up, took a refund, and went to the store to buy a new unit. No problems since.
We ended up deciding that MS must not really be doing comprehensive quality control on it's rebuilds, and that they're only fixing the most easily spotted problem on returned units (if that much) and not looking for deeper failures.
I don't trust the refurbished xbox at all. And, honestly, I'm now a bit weary of buying any refurbished electronics.
So, for all those statisticians quoting 1 in 204 trillion odds, I think it's safer to say that a spanking new unit has that failure rate, while a refurbished unit might have a failure rate much closer to unity. If they'd bothered to send him a new unit at any point for his troubles, my bet is he'd have a much better chance at keeping the thing (and it might not help to dust!)
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
And maybe not even the wiring in his house but the feed to his house.
I'd not only consider a power conditioner, but also hooking up a power monitor to track and record the power condition throughout the use of the device up through and including any failures.
When I used to run a dial-up BBS, or call other dial-up BBSes, late at night about the same time every night (between 1 and 3 am) there'd be a burst of line noise as the generators that feed my area were switched, affecting both power and phone lines (different circuits but each sourced their power from the same provider).
Otherwise, it may be akin to the Pauli Effect, named after Wolfgang Pauli, a 20th century physicist whose mere presence in the lab would, according to folklore, ruin experiments, and make equipment malfunction or even blow up. Though I hesitate to call this the "J. Lowe Effect".
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
No, the reasonable assumption is that something on Justin's end is actually the cause of the problem.
Which is what most of the good earlier posts in this thread claimed. Not that he was a liar.
Your reasoonable assumption just isn't as reasonable as mine.
I'm haven't seen it so I might as well make the mention that this is probably the most genius approach to inflating your TRST numbers EVER.
I have this strange thing happen to me where I remember the instances that support the things I already believe are true, and I forget all instances that'd don't.
And you do, too.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
It's an XBox, not an airplane.
emt 377 emt 4
at first I thought this was impossible, but the article mentions that two of the eleven were DOA. Hard to blame DOAs on the user. With a 20% DOA rate this becomes a bit more believable. My guess is they keep sending refurb units that are just crap they get to boot up, but still can't handle real use.
There's an old adage that if your girlfriends keep dumping you, there's a good chance the problem isn't with them. I think the same thing applies here.
But the GP (whom I was replying to) said to ignore the probable higher failure rate of the returned XBox units. 23% seems ridiculously high, I imagine that it's closer to 5% base failure rate with a 25% failure rate on returned XBoxes (which is painfully high).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I've seen some smoke-related failures...if this guy chain smokes while playing games that can gum up everything from optical drives to power supplies. Not saying for sure, just something that can lead to serial failures.
Dang, dude. I'd just ask for my money back. Maybe the powers-that-be are trying to tell you to get up out of that orange Cheetos dust and go outside and play, eh?
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I've heard of a situation where a CIO had several top of the line phones that kept breaking on him. The problem was that he had carpet that would build up a huge charge. He was basically shocking his phone to death.
and therefore living in lalaland. If you manufacture to the normal, acceptable standards of quality production as expounded by the likes of Marshall, Deming and Juran you are producing with a failure rate of 3 deviations from the mean. In other words you are making 99.999 per cent operational product. Now before people make alternative claims lets be clear about something. The more efficient your production process the more profitable your operation is. Quality management costs less than a random rate of failure so it is axiomatic that a modern production method implements a quality production process. All things being equal it is therefore probable that in a modern production process only one X Box 360 in every 1,000,000 would have a significant fault. Anything else is conspiracy.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
There are so many failing 360s in the UK, apparently MS is having to ship 1,500-2,500 a day to a repair centre in Prague: http://www.360-gamer.com/news.asp?id=1143
Considering the amount of time and number of production lots his various consoles were pulled from, it's fairly safe to assume
his sample was random, with each pull having precisely the same odds of being a dud.
Not entirely different than rolling snake eyes eleven times in a row. It seems improbable, but in fact is no more or less improbable than any other sequence, yet there's always that one jackass Job who comes up snake eyes with every roll...
See: "Luck"
Kept "overheating" or something, and the store kept saying it was the programs I was using and then the power supply. So we kept swapping them out until they wouldn't let me anymore. The period between startup and crash would start at a few hours and inevitably get down to a few minutes, until I was never sure whether I should PRINT or SAVE my file because either one might increase the chances of a crash...
MS Xbox service is bar none the worst I have ever encountered. The worst. On par with Gitmo and prison sodomy in terms of customer service.
I'm working from memory here but I have notebook of notes:
My box went red ring of light death on June 4th. I called XBox and discovered you have to get through the auto attendant Max, no matter what. So after about 5 minutes of Max I got stuck in a queue to talk to Eric or Gilbert or whatever they called Rajiv that day.
That person walked me through the process of the getting th SN etc and I gave them $140 via a credit card for them to process the 'repair'.
REPAIRS ARE SWAPS WITH ANOTHER REFURB UNIT.
So they send you a box to drop your old unit and remail it. The box took 4 days to get to me. It arrives fully assembled with no outer packaging:
It was damaged
It was damp
It was left on my porch
Apparently Xbox can't figure out how to ship a collapsed box that the postal service can stick in your mailbox. Anyway in goes the unit and I drive it down to UPS to ship it off.
It was sent the 8th. Xbox does not see it and log it back in until the 14th. Now begins a daily series of calls to get any status at all on this unit. Remember you have to get through Max the Justin Long of voice attendants first EVEN IF YOU HAVE A FUCKING INCIDENT NUMBER. The Best you can do is state loudly "AGENT" and "Max" breaks procedure and routes the call to another queue
Where you wait. And wait and wait about 15-20 minutes on average. When you get a person, 5 times out of 6 you get someone in India who
DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH OR IF THEY DO THEIR ACCENT IS SO THICK ITS UNINTELLIGIBLE BUT THE REALLY FUN PART IS THAT THESE RETARDS CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE SAYING EITHER.
My last name is six letters, six. SIX. I had to spell it out letter by letter EIGHT fucking times before I just started screaming and hung up the phone because Meena or whomever could not speak the language.
And so it goes a daily experience of trying to get some information. Around June 22-23 (7 days of calling) I found a agent who claimed to contact the service center and who stated it would arrive in 3-5 business days. He gave me a UPS tracking number which I discovered inside of 10 minutes was invalid. He also told me a 'supervisor' would call to verify.
They never did.
Let me just interrupt here that at the same time I fired off a bunch of support emails to Xbox trying to get any information at all. Their official email response was 'WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT AND CAN'T HELP YOU PLEASE CALL'
(3 of the calls during this time they simply hung up on me)
Anyway on the 24th I got an email back from support telling me the unit shipped and gave me another UPS tracking number which was also invalid. So I started calling again on the 24th, (we don't know anything), the 25th (it was picked up on the 24th and will be there 3-5 days and the 26th.
On the 26th - I was in the hold queue for a half hour. The person I spoke to immediately put me on hold the moment I gave them the incident number. After 15 minutes on hold they gave me the same invalid UPS tracking number. I would not let them go and they stuck me on hold again for another 15-20 minutes until some 'supervisor' got on the phone. Upon which time he told me that the UPS tracking number was right and that at this point, they didn't know where the unit actually was, just that it had 'probably' been shipped and that I should call UPS to figure it out and 'maybe they can help you'.
This was Tuesday the 26th, this week. So I called UPS, got their autoattendant and low and behold the tracking number had finally hit their system. That day. In fact it hadn't been shipped on Sunday it was shipped Tuesday afternoon about 2:30 local time or 3 hrs before I called them to check.
So here it is the 28th. 6 minutes ago it hit Greensboro NC but hasn't left yet. I don't if it will get to me in Raleigh today, but almost certainly tomorrow. June 30th.
That will
I owned one of those Audis, a 1985 5000S. Never had the "sudden acceleration" problem, but I completely understand where it came from. The gas pedal and the brake pedal were so close together that it was very easy to have your foot on both pedals. Also, in a panic situation, I could easily see how people could hit both pedals at once, or the wrong one. Most of the "sudden acceleration" accidents were elderly drivers who have been known to hit the wrong pedal in any car.
Either way, it was a great car. 190,000 miles before the transmission fell out. Not bad for an 80's car.
It is however more brittle and is more prone to cracking or unbonding under thermal stress.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Um, actually PetSmart DOES sell defective fish in that many of them are sick or overly stressed to begin with. We've personally had better luck with fish from independent stores because they take better care of their tanks and fish even though their prices are higher thn PetSmart.
It's also a little unfair to compare the 360 to a fish anyways. What's PetSmart going to do with a dead fish? Say "we're sorry you had problems with your fish, here's a refurb!" and exchange your dead fish for another one? (hm, ok, maybe this is what Microsoft is doing...)
No I don't think all the problems the guy has encountered have been due to the heat sink. However, that would then indicate that either:
1: Microsoft is recycling known defective units as refurbs back to customers.
2: There are multiple issues with the 360 - or at least the batch that Microsoft keeps sending to customers as replacements - and the heatsink is just one of them.
Either way, it indicates that Microsoft has a problem.
to get 11 dead in a row 2.04E20 to 1 odds. If failure rate was 5%
thats 204,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1
Ok, I'm probably wrong so someone correct me. I bet I'm close.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
It's a new design, the manufacturing line is new - they are likely not getting "normal, acceptable standards of quality production" but the main contributing factor I would be looking at is the testing of the refurbished units. Someone is sending this guy faulty units - it's worth backtracking from there and seeing what the quality checks are at this point and see if the testing after repair falls short of the testing after manufacture. Some places have a culture or even written policy of fixing the obvious fault, not bothering to see if there are any secondary faults, and sending it out if it powers on instead of running the series of tests that a new unit will undergo. Even if that is the case it's possible that the tests are not going to catch faults that will only be clear after some time - testing methods are revised all of the time in many situations.
I've never owned an Xbox myself (I always figured what's the point since it's just a glorified PC in the shape of a games console)
- on-a-xbox-360/
However a certain freind of mine did a little investigation with the faulty ones he's had so far (given that he's a PC support engineer)
From the looks of things the problem appears to be a fundamental design flaw with the way the heat sink attaches to the main board
typically it attaches over a large area
once certain parts of the board heat up more than others this causes the board to flex and bend slightly
since the heatsink spans a large area, this results in certain sections underneath the heatsink cross to become drawn or pulled away from the main heatsink ever so slightly
the end result is something critical that should be in contact with the heatsink under the cross is no longer in contact, i.e. Red screen of death
http://www.hiptechblog.com/2006/10/30/cook-an-egg
basic troubleshooting skills tells you something else is wrong.
it's not the consoles if 11 of them have gone bad. Check the condition of your powerlines. are you plugging them into the same power outlet?
They're using their grammar skills there.
More proof that the mod system is broken: you're the second person to use the generalization fallacy, and yet instead of being modded "redundant" you're "insightful".
Dude, 20 perfectly working X-Boxes does not tell you anything about the average overall quality of the product, especially when the sample is non-random.
It's probably more low-tech than that.
Heavy smoker?
Dozens of shedding pets?
A dusty parrot?
Maybe it's an air-quality thing. Smoke from his coffee roasting hobby, the BBQ restaurant next door.
Kids that play with glitter..
I'm just thinking that SOMETHING is getting into those XBox and playing havoc with the fans or optical drive.
I'm no huge fan of microsoft, but I have some sympathy for them here same as with the stories about the Wii-mote we had a few months ago. The trouble with hardware failure is that it's going to be on a bell curve . . . the systems will have an average life expectancy (which I woun't try to guess at) but we're only going to hear about the ones that fail almost immediately and not the ones at the other end of the curve that are still working happily in like ten-twenty years time.
A lot of things could go wrong. These consoles run hot for a start. As the parts heat up they expand which puts stress on things like solder joints. Thermal fatigue is something that occurs as thing move about when they heat and cool - the end result is exactly like bending a wire back and forth until it breaks. That's just one possible mode of failure but it's one that is hard to identify with small parts until the thing actually breaks. Just because we can name failure modes like this does not mean they will never happen - consider coding and that there have been a lot of buffer overflows since the 1950s.
Then you get secondary damage from failure. I'm assuming the replacements were refurbished because that is almost always the case. If they were originally heat damaged for example the components around the overheated component may also be damaged but it may not have been obvious when they were being repaired.
All 11 XBox360 probably spent their life in the sweltering heat of an Ikia "stereo cabinet", nestled between a 500W amplifier and a digital cable receiver with no fan of its own.
There, gasping for heated breath behind a tinted-glass door, the XBox baked under a rush of hot air.
apologies to the coen brothers
yey for annecdotes. I'm on my second xbox 360. The first one had issues where it would freeze after long periods of play. Then it got stolen, and I got a new one. This one has a dvd drive that starts to skip and cause read errors. Both issues were fixed by buying a loud ass intercooler device that snaps onto the back, or not playing during the summer. I live in Florida we keep things warm down here because electricity is expensive as fuck. I have a friend who has one, and he also talks of hardware glitches. early ps2's also were notorious for burning out. However, I have never heard of a console being this problematic. They never sold external cooling devices for ps2's.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
You are correct, this person must be an idiot. Anybody who goes through all that must have some fundamental flow. At some point you would think he would have stopped accepting refurbished units and only accepted a refund.
-rd
It's called an entropy field.
Some people have it.
Like normal entropy, you can have positive or negative entropy.
You ever know a person who'd have a computer problem, and they'd go to get a certain tech or person to help, but the minute that person gets there, the problem fixes itself?
Or maybe you're the person who has the phantom problem that goes away when people walk into the room.
That person has positive entropy.
Now we have the converse, the guy who has an above normal failure rate, or more likely, when he has a lot of things fail in a relatively short amount of time.
The guy who has to get his new car into the shop every month.
The guy who has 5 bad hard drives in a year, despite being new.
The guy who's cd laser dies out after only a few months.
Or, more aptly, the guy who's hceck engine light keeps comming on but no one ever knows why.
This guy has negative entropy.
Negative entropy more often than not, fluctuates, so it is a harder problem to notice, but is easier to detect when it is high as it causes massive failures.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
There must be a few xbox360 returns.....
:(
tigerdirect is now selling refurbished premium units
Only a 90 day warranty tho. I don't really have an interest in paying $150 a month for a couple video games, cause i dont trust it to make it that far. ($300 for unit and 3 $50 games with no guarentee any of it makes it past 3 months, and some chance it may spend a chuck of it in the shop)
Now we know where his 1st 10 units went....
I have 1 friend with an xbox 360, i lost count on his returns after unit number 3
A dusty dead parrot I bet.
I don't know 20 people with 360s, but I do know 5. All 5 have experienced the 'red ring of death' and sent the box back to MS for repair. That failure rate, from my limited perspective, is totally unacceptable. As much as I'd love to get a 360, I absolutely refuse to do so until MS corrects whatever issues is causing this problem or extends the warranty to 3+ years.
Petsmart DOES sell defective fish. I had a tank infected with cottonmouth fungus from a Farking petsmart fish. Killed a mating pair of $240.00 severum.
Petsmart sells low grade fish. they do not quarantine them to make sure you are getting healthy fish, they just shove-em out the door.
Granted my fault for not putting feeder fish in a safety tank for 15-30 days before going in my 90 gallon tank but I've never had the problem before when I bough feeders from a real pets store that cared and made sure their feeders were clean.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What magic does Microsoft have that they can release such crappy products as Xbox and Vista yet still the general public forgives them?
THis guy had 11 faulty Xboxes yet still gives Microsoft an 8 out of 10!!! whats up with that?
I've had my 360 since the day it came out, never had any problems with it - I guess some people are just unlucky!
Not when you consider that they might be sending him the exact same unit back to him, over and over.......
The only consistent feature in all your unsatisfying relationships is YOU. (Despair)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I'm on my 3rd Xbox 360. I run a data center, and am pretty careful about disk handling, cooling and clean power. But the worst part of this little episode has been the ability of ALL three of the (new) 360's to put scratches in $60 disks. I'm on the 3rd Oblivion Disk (all have been scratched into uselessness) and they've also screwed up 2 Ultimate Alliances. Manager at MicroCenter is willing to replace them - not everyone will be so lucky. Replacing scratched DVD's is expensive, and not always possible without re-buying them. Hard to believe that 3 out of 3 Oblivion disks were (originally) defective, and 2 out of 2 Ultimate Alliance. Halo 2 also crapped out. Is this their master plan?
I know it's third hand information but I regularly speak with people on a popular gaming messageboard and one of the guys there is up to seven consoles, he has no reason to lie, seriously.
He's used a UPS , Power conditioner, he's even moved house (co-incidentally) I think he's tried multiple TV's - he's pretty much eliminated all the variables and still 7 down.
He loves the games on the system and is always |_| so close to swapping to a PS3 but ultimately the games he loves are on the 360.
It's a real shame and it's why I don't own one yet myself (and dipshit Microsoft love halting the release of products in other regions! Hello, Australia want the elite too!)
Either way, that's an appauling amount of consoles to fail.
Also one of the members of this particular forum ran a 'survey' system which had about 500 or so users on there, each time one failed they incrimented the number for each user.
A large quantity of guys only had 1 console, no failures but ultimately it worked out to around a 20% failure rate according to his survey, with of course the guy with 7 dead ones at the top of the list.
Crazy stuff, I'm waiting for the 'fixed' edition! (it better come out before GTA4 goddamnit!)
The issue is more likely the conditions this user has subjected these game consoles to, rather than the consoles themselves all being flawed from the start. For example, is he running the consoles in a filthy area with lots of airborne particles, such as dust and hair/fur? Is he using the consoles in a confined area, preventing proper ventilation or using third party cooling devices like clip-on fans?
Granted, these aren't generally issues one would associate with devices like a VCR, but these next-gen consoles are atypical for entertainment appliances in that they require extra considerations just like any modern desktop computer. Interruptions in air-flow can be a death sentence for these kinds of devices. Many times, it's not always obvious what can cause such interruptions. For example, running a high-end desktop computer without the casing properly enclosed can prevent an adaquate circulation of air to many vital areas, simply because there's no longer a definite path for it to follow. (Even placing an external desktop fan blowing directly onto the exposed areas may not work.)
It's extremely unlikely these systems all just "went bad" without some kind of human intervention involved... such as someone at microsoft's repair center intentionally messing with the guy for sending in too many systems, or more likely, improper use at the user end.
For what it's worth, I have a launch date 360 that continues to function perfectly despite regular use with games like Crackdown and Oblivion. (Most likely due to the fact I keep the system in a clean, well-ventilated area...)
8==8 Bones 8==8
There have been so many returns in the UK that one of Microsoft's 3rd party repair companies has stopped repairing them stating that this is a manufacturing defect and should be fixed at source rather than by them.
- company-has-had-enough-of-repairing-xbox-360/
http://www.weplayxbox.com/2007/06/28/exclusive-uk
This reminds me of where I used to work. Oddly, we had a few UPS's, several monitors, and various other computer components "catch smoke," oftimes right out of the box. Tested the power on the wall, and it was good. The monitors were plugged into decent power bars as well, so shouldn't have suffered surges.
What we figured is that it had something to do with our neighboring business, a dentist, especially since in the very next room was a big X-ray machine and other large equipment. It could be one of those environmental things that just can't be easily easily found, but then again it could just as easily be a common recurring defect, contributing, climate conditions (not power, but humidity, heat, etc), and the fact that the first few were returned refurbs anyhow.
I'm waiting for my 3rd one as we speak/write, the first two were both three blinking lights of death, had to pay to repair the first one but then they ended up reimbursing me, Then they tried to tell me i would have to pay for my second one even though it was under it's new warranty, though after a bit of research they backtracked on that, hint always keep the paperwork. Hopefully the third one works like a charm.
I have to admit though customer service has been expectational , got a really nice person everytime and helped me take care of this, of course I would rather not deal with them at all.
When I did tech support many years back, we had a customer who lost a Sun workstation every couple of months. After a while, we got serious about investigating.
Turns out their building had two types of power plugs; ones that were on a separate service for computers and such, and plugs that were only suitable for things that were pretty tolerant, because they were used for some huge machinery, and had CONSTANT voltage spikes and drops.
The workstations were plugged into the wrong power bits.
This really, to me, sounds more like a guy whose setup is damaging machines than like manufacturing problems.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Like a customer that comes back to PetsMart with dead fish after dead fish, I have trouble believing after 8 dead fish that ALL of the problem is PetsMart selling defective fish.?
I suspect the 3rd or 4th time you went back to PetSmart with the dead fish, they would suspect you were killing the fish yourself and refuse to replace it.
Yet Microsoft seem quite willing to replace his console time after time after time as well as doing the same for a substantial number of other people. The costs of this can't be insignificant so it would seem that they are willing to accept the blame for these problems rather than blaming their customers. Why would that be, I wonder?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I suspect there is something untoward happening here. Since these are seemingly infant mortality issues, let's just assume a failure rate of 3%, which is still ridiculous by today's manufacturing standards. Even with that, the odds of getting 11 bad XBoxes in 6 months are, well, let's just say you have a much better chance of winning the powerball.
Either that, or someone in MS's warranty department knows the guy and is playing a cruel prank on him, or just recognizes his name and has it in for him, or something.
I can all but guarantee that this is not a random event. You statisticians out there probably CAN guarantee this is non-random haha.
"We didn't listen, We didn't listen!!!"
When the odds are high enough, it becomes much more likely that something else is going on. That's why people don't believe one such person. If twenty people claimed the same problems, then the odds that something else is going on drop dramatically, and it makes those people's claim more likely. The word for someone who believes a claim no matter how unlikely is "gullible".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Actually, a single dead console doesn't mean anything. One person having 11 dead consoles, however, does. If you have a hardware defect rate of 5% within a year, one in 20 people will have to replace their console within one year. That's nothing out of the ordinary. However, the probability of killing 11 consoles, given the same hardware defect rate, is about 0.05^11 (not quite, since you don't start out with all 11 consoles, so consoles you get later have less time to break within the same first year). In other words, only one in about 204,800,104,857,653 persons will have to replace 11 consoles. Microsoft has, however, only sold about 10'000'000 consoles
What does this tell us? Either this guy is doing something wrong, or Microsoft's hardware defect rate must be way above 5% per year.
You're new here, aren't you?
I am on my 3rd 360s.
1st - bought Dec 2005 died March 2007 - BIOS update problem.
2nd - bought refurb from geeks.com in April 2007 - BIOS update problem. - EXCHANGE
3rd - Exchange for the 2nd one. Works great but the console can't read any 360s games even with the HD-DVD drive. Waiting for return.
So far I spend more money on a working 360 console...
$399 - 1st console
$325 - 2nd console
$20 - return S&H
$200 - HD-DVD drive
Total $944. That's more money than what I spend on a PS3 ($599).
Am I the only one who is very disappointed with the current generation of game consoles? The problem is that every now and then you are required to upgrade the firmware/BIOS (Don't know about the Wii). The worst one of all is the Sony PS3. I am running 1.80 right now and less than a month later, Sony release 1.81 which would not make me want to endanger my pricey console. But Sony force you to upgrade to the latest version of the BIOS if you want to go to the Sony Store. I don't flash my PC BIOS that often, actually, none at all. I feel like I am paying the companies to test their system but not get paid for the work. If the upgrade failed after the warranty, I feel like that I can hear Bill Gates or CEO of Sony laughing all the way to the bank.
One time back in college it happened when I was walking with my girlfriend. I said something to the effect of, "I always feel weird when that happens." She said she'd never had it happen to her before.
The most creepy was when it happened with three consecutive lights. I figured I was about 5 seconds away from being beamed back up to the mothership. It would happen for me consistantly with this one streetlight at an intersection near my house. I'd go out walking at night and I could always count on it blinking off when I went past. I figured it had to have something to do with vibration and the age of the light, a sodium vapor lamp. This came up on another board I read and one of the posters said it happened with his girlfriend all the time and seemed to be more pronounced when she was in strong emotional states. They had a huge fight and she left his apartment. He watched her storm down the hallway and he could see the ceiling lamps dim and flicker as she passed beneath them.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
See subject, nuff said.
Some of you seem to misunderstand probabilities; Many of you assume incorrectly that since the probability of having that many bad units in a row, by one person is something along the lines of 2*10^10 (I might be off by a few orders of magnitude) and thus since it is so utterly improbable that it should never happen. What people drawing this conclusion fail to grasp is that probabilities tell us only how OFTEN we might expect to see such an anomaly, but they don't tell us WHEN we will see them, thus many people incorrectly assume that, to have an event with a probability of 1 in 2*10^10 you have to have reached that number in order to find the anomaly; that is to say they assume that to find that anomaly you must have >2*10^10-1.
In addition, most people seem to treat probabilities as facts instead of logic based guesswork, thus fueling misconceptions. The fact remains that when discussing highly improbable occurrences such as these, they almost invariably happen, the only thing the statistical probability tells us is how many times the event has to happen before such an anomaly results again.
In the case where we are seeing many more anomalies than our calculations of probabilities predict, than it is quite likely that the dataset upon which our predictions are based is flawed.
As to Microsoft's claim of a 3% defect rate, I would wager that in the case of NEW consoles the actual failure rate was about 2-6%, and with REFURBISHED consoles I would guess the defect rate is somewhere between 8-15%, because of undetected/non-repaired issues.
B) Why is this a bad thing? As it turns out, Microsoft's decision to make what amounted to a modded PC turned out to be a boon for consumers allowing cross-development on PC and XBOX games (something that continues with the 360), with lots of great PC games ported to the console. And the design made the XBOX the most hackable console in history, having more emulators and hacked software than any console. XBOX Media Center is the shit.
(not every one does mind you) then why get the same thing again in console form XBOX Media Center is the shit if it's mythtv your talking about then fair enough
otherwise no comment
My experience goes all the way back to the Atari 2600, and I'm a "traditional consumer". Meaning that when I buy something, I expect that it will be mine, and that given reasonable care, it will last a reasonable period of time. I believe that many companies are hoping to create a new consumer model, wherein those who purchase something don't have these fundamental, logical expectations.
This has become obvious in the realm of videogame consoles. During the 128-bit era we began to see several examples of console games released with serious bugs (the sort of bugs that are game-stoppers). Up until this point, the mere concept of such a thing was unimaginable, ludicrous. Prior to the Sony PS2, I never had a console that didn't last at least until the next generation or iteration. In fact, all the consoles I've owned have lasted long enough so that emulation via PC was a truly viable alternative, except for my Dreamcast, but it's still functional. For myself and many others, the PS2 heralded the beginning of this "age of lowered expectations". Yes, modern consoles are much more complex and produce more heat. Addressing these issues adequately is what the designers are paid for.
As consumers, we have a duty to raise a stink when the products we buy fail to come anywhere close to meeting our expectations of functionality or longevity. Remaining silent (or accusing those who raise a stink) only ensures that eventually, everything we buy will be crap.
Wow, surprised to hear news about defective xbox360s still! I feel for this guy and hopes that he gets lucky on his 12th.