Black Raven Dragoons

[jerred]

Dang, my 360 is screwed again. this is the third problem ive had. I have had two hard drive failures and now my disks wont play. if you have any advise on this or just want to talk about how shitty 360s are, respond

[Zancarius]

It's a Microsoft product.

[Grimblast]

baddum ching!

[Killemal]

the warranty is great though. When mine went fizzle they replaced it.

[Zancarius]

It better be. It's a Microsoft product.

[Snobal]

It's a Microsoft product.

QFT


Also, when you send your 360 in, it is said that they give you others that have been refurbished and the likes.

[Killemal]

Pretty much any product that goes in on a warranty issue is replaced with a refurb. It's just the way it is.

[Zancarius]

This is true--even hard disks.

[Tarlas]

lol. He just burned 20 bucks on a disk cleaner and it doesnt help. 360 is crap lol

[Zancarius]

Okay, MS jokes aside--in all fairness, the 360 is a fairly complicated piece of hardware. What you get is essentially a multi-core PC based on a RISC CPU using the cheapest components possible in order to make it affordable. The result? Well, you're going to experience failures from time to time. It's just expected. On the other hand, how many 360s are out there which have never been problematic? I'd wager a significant number.

Another thing to take into consideration: Consoles of today aren't like the ones from yesteryear when you could pretty well beat the hell out of them, and they'd still work. (Unless you dropped it from such a height that the solder joints came loose.) That's because things back then had no moving parts. In electronics, the most likely thing to fail under high stress environments when you have hardware with no moving parts is usually the connector(s). Here's a good example: My father used to work at the high-speed test track out near Holloman AFB. It's an incredible environment to work in--you're dealing with high-vibration environments that are in the 10s of Gs. Ordinary hardware would fly to bits and connectors would come loose before they even made it a quarter mile down the track. What did they do? They encased the entire hardware assembly in epoxy. Sure, it made repairs or modifications impossible--but generally, even that wouldn't last but for one or two runs.

Now, picture today's consoles: We've got fans, hard disks, and optical drives. We've got a bagillion connectors, dozens of ICs for various tasks, and way more than one or two CPU-class sockets (multi-core processors, north/south bridge controller chipsets, probably IO controllers, too). One inconvenient drop and the entire thing is buggered. Insufficient cooling? Same thing. (I think the cooling issue was a big problem for the early generation 360s. I don't really remember. I know Turus had an issue with one of his even when he had numerous fans blowing on it in a well-ventilated air conditioned environment--now, tell me that's not screwed up.) The problem is, that even if you're incredibly careful with hardware that is this complex when it's assembled of cheap, commodity parts, you're bound to run into problems. Is it MS' fault? Yes and no. Consumers aren't going to buy hugely expensive consoles (though the Wii seems to be the exception, although part of that cost is due to the package requirements set forth from Nintendo). So, make them cheap--sell them at a loss. In fact, I believe the Xbox division was a bit cash sink for MS for the first couple of years until people really started getting into the games and their developer packages encouraged devs to write for the platform.

So, there's my rant. It's MS' fault to an extent, but it's also their fault by necessity. Then again, last I checked, Wii sales were over 3 times Xbox sales last quarter... so, who knows.

[Snobal]

Okay, MS jokes aside--in all fairness, the 360 is a fairly complicated piece of hardware.

In George Bush's mind, yes.


Before anyone that's so jacked up in politics they can't take a joke, let me go ahead and say. Just kidding.

[Zancarius]

While we're talking politics, he's Al Gore's take on the design of the 360:

Well, it's a very complicated piece of hardware. You see, you've got the Kurds in the north bridge. You've got the Shi'ites in the south bridge. And you've got multi-coalition forces in the CPU tryin' to fight over who's got what resources.

[Killemal]

Seriously, the 360 is one badass piece of equipment. The 1st and 2nd gen Xbox 360's had issues with heat. The solder that Microsoft used was 100% lead free. They didn't want to poison the environment and it's customers; good thing, right? Yes and no. The 0% lead solder couldn't hold up to the heat generated by the GPU, hence broken solder joints and GHF (Red Ring of Death). They fixed that with the 3rd gen 360. True, there are other issues (sometimes, it just WON'T read a disk), but all in all, Microsoft has put out one hell of a product. If I had to make a list of my favorite products out right now, both the Xbox 360 and the Zune would be in my top 5.

[Zancarius]

That's actually pretty interesting. It's also somewhat comical. I often wonder how many ecologically-friendly solutions have resulted in subpart consumer goods.

[Grimblast]

Space Shuttles Ceramic tiles. Nuff Sed.