Slashdot Mirror
Increase In Xbox 360 E74 Problems
Xbm360 writes "According to data collected by Joystiq as well as Google Trends, there's been a steady rise in reports and discussion of the so-called E74 error on Xbox 360 consoles since August of last year. The E74 error is related to video problems caused by either a faulty AV connector or, more often, a loosened ANA/HANA scaling chip. This is not the first time the Xbox 360 has experienced technical issues; in recent years many people have complained about scratched discs and over-heating consoles — the 'red ring of death.'"
If that was true than the same would be happening to the PS3 and Wii. But these haven't caused not even a third of the problems the XBox had. It was just poor design, Microsoft knew about it but launched it anyway so it would be the first in its generation. There was a thread here in Slashdot about this.
Of course an XBox 360 is less stable than, say, a SNES. Of course a 1960 Chevy truck was more sturdy than a 2009 model. It's in the nature of things to become more fragile the more versatile they get.
This is the attitude that's killing tech industries the world over.
There's a set of minimums to meet for a product to be fit for purpose. Okay you don't need the sturdy steel chassis of a 1960 Chevy truck to drive around town with occassional longer trips so as the technology has improved and parts could be made lighter and cheaper it made sense to do so. However if as a result the damn thing dies for no reason after a couple of months use, or touching it dents it, you bet people will be complaining.
So if someone's throwing around or stomping on their Xbox 360 and it dies, good and well, they're an idiot. If they're careful with it and it still lasts as long as a $2 item from the junk shop there's a problem.
Why is it in tech we have people rant on about how it's the way of progress and things moving forward that tech becomes useless fragile junk, or the software doesn't work on hardware specified on the box as being minimum, or loses people's data, then wonder why people think we're propeller heads?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There's a lot being said about the infamous red ring of death killing 360's but Sony are getting almost no coverage of their issues.
There's been a large scale problem of Blu Ray drives in PS3s dying from the Diode burning out. This recently happened to me when I wanted to dust off the console to play RE5. I've replaced drive heads in the PS2 before so I thought I'd save £60 and repair it myself. Turns out the drive head that is in 'all EU 40gb ps3s' with two lenses, isn't in mine and I have to fork out another £60 on top of what I've spent already to get the correct part...
There seems to be two main possible causes of this happening: a patch increased the voltage going to the drive in an attempt to speed up the slow load times, some models can't take this and fail (the way the drives take a while to fail completely and cases focus around big new releases that force you to patch make this seem possible).
Second is turning the power switch off when there's a disc in the drive, apparently the drive hates it and is very sensative to power fluctations. Seems incredibly crappy if this is the case. I hate leaving things in standby.
I just can't understand why modern games consoles have so many problems. I've never had any drive fail except in consoles, Not even the cheapest, nastiest generic drives I could get have ever failed.
It's in the nature of things to become more fragile the more versatile they get.
Actually, it's in the nature of /. to consider a random poll on joystiq (which could easily be hijacked by say, ps3 fanboys or MS haters) and unverifiable data from google trends as irrefutable proof of increased E74 errors.
Xbox 360 consoles were dying in store demo kiosks months before the console went on sale.
> Hardcore Xbox fans screamed it was incompetent store employees who didn't know how to hook up a console
Xbox 360 consoles were dying at game media offices months before the console went on sale.
> Hardcore Xbox fans screamed it was just pre-release hardware and the real consoles wouldn't have those problems
Xbox 360 consoles were dying when they went on sale to the general public
> Hardcore Xbox fans screamed that they were just the first batch and that once production got moving those 'kinks' would be worked out
Every new Xbox 360 model continued to have massive numbers of hardware failures
> Hardcore Xbox fans screamed the new models about to come out fix those problems
Microsoft knew about the problems before the console was released and they went right ahead and put the turd of console up for sale regardless. They knew they had a fundamentally botched hardware design and lied through their teeth about the defective hardware until they finally had to fork out 1.1 billion in repair bills.
There is ZERO incentive for Microsoft to ship working hardware. The niche Xbox fanbase of the console market has demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to buy 3,4,5 or more new consoles without hesitation. It has helped inflate the installed base for the 360 mostly in the US but done nothing in Japan and Europe where the number of fanatical Microsoft fans is tiny.
The problem for Microsoft is the sales numbers from major console game publishers is showing equal to or greater sales rates for multiplatform games on the PS3 even though the 360 supposedly having a huge installed base amount in the US.
Either:
1. PS3 owners are buying massively more multiplatform games relative to 360 owners
2. The number of duplicate 360 consoles owned in the US is gigantic
It's a common fallacy that versatile means "more fragile", propogated by exactly this sort of poor design and manufacture. Just because you've witnessed it, doesn't mean the opposite (i.e. stable, versatile and modern) isn't possible or available. The problem is that almost EVERYTHING modern is rushed out the door to sell it, especially games consoles - build it cheap, stack it high. "Fix it in firmware" are words that you DO NOT want to hear - it means someone isn't doing their job. Even the ability of upgrading firmware should be rarely used, hard to do and positively discouraged.
It's like the people who say "Well, Vista should crash more, it's newer!". No, it shouldn't - it should be learning by the mistakes of the past few decades and be virtually uncrashable (this is NOT impossible - and yet in two trials of Vista I've crashed machines within literally hours of building them for my workplace without even doing anything "fancy" like installing drivers or applications, or installing new hardware, or using unsupported or broken hardware, etc.). In fact, the exact opposite should be true and it should be more reliable, faster on the same machine, and do more, because it's based on decades-old technology with a new sheen. System requirements should not be going up as quickly as they are (almost damn exponential!) - and now that we're hitting limits (CPU speed, etc.), some OS and programs are showing their limitations and actually getting SLOWER on the top-end hardware because they rely on things just getting faster every year. There was a time when a PC upgrade meant that everything ran faster. Now it merely means that things run.
In terms of software, reliability should be going *up* all the time - the software should be getting fixed more and more as time goes on, not thrown out with each new iteration. You win by making things SIMPLE and reuseable, not complex. The simpler they are, the easier they are to find problems, the less they have to go wrong, the easier they are to fix. That's *software*. Easily updateable, changeable *software*. Hardware should be a million times more solid.
Games consoles are enclosed systems. Their hardware has been fixed to a finite set of components that will not change. Their OS software has a long time in which to be designed and is very basic - load game, run it, everything else should be handled by the application, so it's not like you have to update the DirectX drivers to fix a bug in a shader model or some such crap - the game works or doesn't and it's the game manufactures fault if it doesn't (this is the way it SHOULD work, anyway... I'm not surprised that MS basically try to make the XBox a mini-PC because it's all they know). Console hardware is *static*. Thus it can be tested *much* more extensively for problems than, say, my bodge-job, home-built, cheap-component PC which has been up now for over a year and never crashed or experienced a hardware problem (or, for that matter, needed any significant hardware maintenance in that time - I think I blew the dust off the fans once while it was still running). Or the dozens of servers, dozens of "blackboxes" and hundreds of client machines that I've built along the same lines in recent years. These things can EASILY run for decades, even being knocked about and moved in school environments. The BBC-Micro's that I pulled out of a skip last year from one school I work at were still perfectly operational despite years of heavy use and having been stored with no maintenance and then thrown (literally) into a skip and having building rubble thrown on them - THAT is solid-state hardware of thirty years ago! They were originally bought as a set of 15. There were still 15 there, all working - one of them we still used for flashing EEPROM's! We should have moved FORWARD from that, not BACKWARD.
A computer should be switched on, work should be done, and then it should be switched off. Anything that causes that cycle not to work under reasonable conditions (i.e. not dropped, not placed in a
This is news? Oh... it's breaking in an entirely new way? Now that's news.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
It's in the nature of things to become more fragile the more versatile they get.
Actually, it's in the nature of /. to consider a random poll on joystiq (which could easily be hijacked by say, ps3 fanboys or MS haters) and unverifiable data from google trends as irrefutable proof of increased E74 errors.
don't forget the ring of death and all those broken discs we made up... because microsoft always makes quality products!
Not really. They have their own H/W design department. They do not manufacture themselves - that's fact. But they design themselves.
Another fact: keyboard/mice/etc H/W design team has ZILCH/ZERO/NADA in common with Xbox* design team. They belong to different business units.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
the fun part is that the competitor had an inverse problem with wiimots being more sturdy than everything else and basically destroying people's tvset, eyes, faces, walls...
I had an XBOX360, and I had a PS3. Sold both a while back when I realized I hadn't played a console game in over six months.
I don't have a vested interest in this article. I don't measure my self-worth by what strangers think of my choice in consoles. I don't give a damn about the RROD, or about the E74 error.
However, I hate stupid articles like this one.
Everything you need to know about the worth of this article is contained in this chart
Lovely, isn't it? And no, the numbers aren't "in thousands". They're talking about reports over the last year going from 3 per month to 15. That's not failures - that's "emails to joystiq.com". It's worse than useless.
Did the emails spike because owners are, in fact, seeing spiking numbers of failures? Did the spike occur because some other site mentioned it with a link to related materials on joystiq.com? Did the emails say if the failures occured this month, or if some people were reporting failures from a couple years ago?
Al Gore would most assuredly approve of that chart.
They point out that their "little study" isn't perfect, and that it's unscientific, but then they say, "as we interpret the data...". Of course that data is statistically insignificant and hopelessly flawed.
If you're going to start beating the drum on something like this you should get your shit together in advance. Otherwise you're going to look like an idiot.
That was my first trip to joystiq.com. Probably my last, too.
shatter harmlessly on impact with your significant other in the heat of game battle anger, or remain in one piece?
Depends if the bitch is screen-peeking or not
They say, "Evil prevails when good men fail to act." What they ought to say is, "Evil prevails."
Now he's unhappy because his Vista machine refuses to play foxnews.com video
Sounds like a nice feature to me. Where can I procure this Vista you speak of?
I repair all generations of video game consoles for a living, and have repaired several thousand consoles. Allow me to touch several bases quickly:
E74 is not "on the rise", it has stayed as steady as ever. 3 red rings of death are declining with the new designs (they were pushing close to 100% failure rate within 3 years for the first generation), so other problems are finally allowed to surface since the consoles actually stay running long enough now.
New generation consoles are ALL going to have MANY more problems than old consoles. It's because of 3 things. They all run hotter since they have behemoth (comparatively) processors. Second, they have TONS more moving parts. Finally, components are smaller and made to less stringent standards (and there are tons more on each board).
The most complicated repair that really ever needs done to cartridge based systems is replacing a fuse. Almost all "broken" systems just need the game connectors cleaned. The processors usually don't even have a heat sink on them because they don't even get warm. The only heat sinks in the things would be on the 7805's. Also, they didn't use custom processors. Older machines had chips like Z80's or 68000's for brains. Obviously established architectures. Then we start adding moving parts, and you actually introduce wear in to the equation where there was no wear before. That was the problem with the NES blinking. The game connector actually had to move around, so it wore out. That's why the SNES and N64 are so much more reliable. They have no moving parts, robust components, and more cooling power than they need. Exactly the opposite of today's designs. New console designs are inherently recipes for disaster. Cheaper components, tons of moving parts, and not enough cooling.
MS could add more cooling. A better fan, or added fans, and a better designed interior for airflow would completely solve the heat issues that kill these things. However, it would require almost completely redesigning case and laying out a new board with different locations of all the parts, both on the board and around the board (meaning even the faceplate, plastic buttons, and drive size would need dealt with). Good luck presenting that to your boss when your product is turning profits just fine right now.
And to anyone saying they never have their disc drives in their computers go bad, try running a program from the CD for EVERY SINGLE SECOND your computer is on, and it probably won't make it to the end of the year. And open and close the drive a dozen times a day.
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