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Microsoft Insider Details Xbox 360 Red Ring Problems
kylemonger writes "A blogger at the Seattle PI has interviewed a Microsoft insider about the Xbox 360 project. The insider purports to have the background story on the 'red ring of death' (RROD) failures and why they are so common. 'RROD is caused by anything that fails in the "digital backbone" on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage. Any one or more, on any chip, or many other discrete components, would cause this. And many of the failures were obviously infant mortality, where they work when they leave the factory and fail early in use. The main design flaw was the excessive heat on the GPU warping the mother board around it. This would stress the solder joints on the GPU and any bad joints would then fail in early life. There are also other significantly high failure rates in other areas, like the DVD.'"
I really hate to reply to my own post, but the flamebait mod here has me wondering: I thought the /. community had left the "Hurrrr... M$" mindset behind somewhere around 2001 or so.
The Cliff's notes version of my post is:
1) Most game consoles since the CD Era have had known, repeatable problems; in some cases, these problems are so widespread that merely googling the description or the fix will net you pages and pages of information.
2) I doubt that 30% is an accurate representation of the XBox 360's problems. Even if it is, though, MS is the only company from the entire set in point 1 that has actually stepped up and taken responsibility. Wow, that's a pretty decent thing to do when you run into a known defect, especially considering that many other companies have fixed the defect for subsequent models and told earlier owners that they can always buy a new one.
3) If you're genuinely concerned, $40 gets you two years of all-inclusive coverage in addition to the three years of RROD coverage from MS.
So I guess it was the fact that I sort-of praised MS that got somebody angry? Because, truly, that post was a classic example of flamebait and deserves to sit alongside "Why would anyone use Vi?" and "It's taken 17 minutes to copy this file."