IGN: Another Xbox 360 bites the dust.

On a forum section like this, its not likely that you have members who don't "care" about such a topic. One might as well argue that those with problems might be too frustrated/sad to post a response.

 

I'm on my first and it has a BB warranty. It had a few disc can't read errors, but not lately. Of course mine is used lightly too. Even the zealots on the official boards are complaining about broken 360s, so it must be real to have them say something negative about their precious.

 

Lol, you mean they are so depressed and 'sad' that they can't even muster up the motivation to post about their traumatizing experience?? Poor babies!

Somehow I don't see it. It's human nature really, people with positive experiences say nothing, people with negative experiences speak out.

Trying to extrapolate a percentage of total owners experiencing sequential failures, based on thread views is pretty useless for a whole number of different reasons.

 

It would be a mistake say that the members of this forum fit into the behaviours and nature of the majority of people on whom you are trying to relate to though (after all, its not human nature to spend so much on electronics, as shown by the percentage of people who own high-end video cards or those who bought a launchday console). I would say in terms of the members who have a Xbox360, the numbers of people who have had problems and have no posted versus the number of people who have not had problems and have not posted should not be in significant ratios with each other simply because the very nature of those in this forum visiting this specific section of the forum do "care".

I agree, but I was talking about only the people who posted. I just looked back at the thread and realized you guys were discussing about drawing conclusions on people viewing a thread. Really though, I can only say that its at best a gauge of the interest of this issue.

 

When i played GOW the system locked 2 times but i belive this is due to software issues, not hardware issues. Those patches and updates me thinks.

 

I'm only on my second one...

mine broke a week before the warranty ended

so I didn't have to pay for anything.

my bestfriend still has his initial one and is working great!

his brother has gone through 4 units...

but I won't blame the unit for breaking...

his brother plays 24/7 (or close to) and has stuffed his system on a dusty shelf w/ a glass door filled with his reciever and cable box...

WITHOUT ANY SORT OF VENTILATION!!!

That's just a crash waiting to happen.

Even his cablebox has died out on him...

He won't listen so it can't be helped...

 

They have been running a reliability survey at Rllmuk forum.

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=149667

The failure rate was around 45%.

They had a longer running topic here.

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=112431&st=1470

My UK launch system still works fine.

 

I hope your right on the April prediction Scooby because the refurb I just received is a 4/06 and so far so good except for random disk errors that seem to occur on many systems. Now that I have my Best Buy console though, I use that as my primary and the refurb is used when friends some over and want to play or I play on PC monitor etc.

 

I had the same problem with my launch unit messing up GR:AW and Viva Pinata. Concentric scratches near the outer edge. Not very deep, but enough to cause read problems/freezes. I picked up a cheapo Memorex Repair unit. Worked pretty well. Figured it wasn't a bad 25$ investment. Especially since the games were long since past return dates, I had no receipts and no idea who I would have to contact or how long the games would be gone before I got replacements.

 

I got mine within 1 month of launch and so far, it only locks up twice. Once was before the big spring update. And second one is more recent during Rainbow 6 (single player - downloading during the background), it locks up. However, I noticed that recently my router/DSL modem is crashing a lot (nothing relating to the 360). My DSL modem is about 5-6 years old...and my router is a $25 piece of crap. It's causing my computer to momentary freeze up when accessing the network.

Anyway, like you my warranty has expired. So far from personal experience, two 360 (bought within launch) didn't show any sign of problem. 1 360 bought around June-ish of last year hasn't crashed (and is much quieter than the other two 360). However, 1 360 in May (bought as a wedding gift for a friend), had a couples of locks up (it wasn't too often, but does happen) and 1 game slightly scratched because the console was knocked over while the disc was spinning in the drive. The game is still playable, but scratched nevertheless.

Overall, the 360's that I have come across has been pretty good. I don't think I take better care of my consoles than others. As the matter of fact, I have a pile of papers on top of the 360, blocking the holes. I know it's a fire hazard, I'll get around to cleaning it up as soon as fixed more important things (such as I have 4 power strips daisy chained against one wall outlet).

 

These numbers are almost unbelivable. If they are anywhere near of the actuall failure rate, I can understand why MS has cut down the estimated shipments of 360 for the next 6 months - they need a HW revision ASAP, they cannot continue to ship this model as the costs of service is astronomical. Fortunately, people seem to love the 360 anyway, and seem to enjoy it a lot while it works - I have yet to see somebody completely pissed off/turned around because of this.

 

Using Google you can easily find a news story from last year where employee of major game developer (probably EA) leaked out that failure rate of their xbox 360 consoles was between 30 to 50 percent. And this was sample of roughly 300 units... So that british (?) poll result sounds very reasonable.

 

I got three bad units and gave up

Well, I enjoyed it a lot while it worked, but after three bad units, I gave up.

The first unit I got was manufactured in April of '06, purchased in May, and it suffered four "this disc is unreadable" errors and one hard lock-up (had to disconnect the power) in 10 hours of play. This was with three brand new Xbox 360 game discs without a scratch on them.

I returned the defective unit to MS (at their expense), and it was replaced with a refurbished unit manufactured in June of '06. It gave the "disc is unreadable" error in just over an hour of play.

I immediately set up a return, and in January of '07, MS sent me another refurbished console, manufactured in April '06. This one gave the "disc is unreadable" error almost immediately, and the audio output made soft popping noises whenever you pushed any button on the controller.

After the third defective unit, I realized that I had spent more time on the telephone (>12 hours) with MS support agents than I actually had spent playing the console. That's when I gave up and sold the console back to the store I bought it from.

Of the three people I know (in real-life) with 360s, one has had no problems since November of this year, and he has logged scores of hours on Gears of War. Another has frequent unreadable disc errors like I had, but he's afraid to return his recently manufactured unit to MS for fear of getting a refurbished unit with an older manufacture date. The third has occasional unreadable disc errors, but he got the in-store warranty, so he's waiting until the next hardware revision before he wastes his time swapping his defective console out for unit after unit after unit . . .

I bought the Xbox 360 fully aware of the Internet reputation of its unreliability; I thought that the reputation was undeserved, overblown, the result of people not treating the console like they should treat a computer . . . Apparently, I was wrong.

 

I'd be really interested to see what Wal-Mart's national return rate on X360s is.

 

300 units is hardly a valid sample size. There are too many mitigating factors that keep those numbers from telling anything.

 

well I know 5 people personally who have 360's (+ me) as well as the 20 or so regulars that I play with on my friends list and I know of only two who have had issues (both from friends list) and they were both launch units.

The new units (Manufactured in 2006 evidently) no longer have nearly the amount of issues.

30-50% ... ridiculous

 

great quote

even ms have now admited the xb360s defection problems are greater than they first said

 

No, 300 units is an excellent sample size. If it is true that anywhere near half of those 300 units is faulty, then that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are serious problems with the design and/or manufacturing of Xbox 360s. Unless all 300 of those came from a "bad batch" that MS has identified a specific problem with, and recalled, there is just no way to explain away the malfunctioning of half of a population of 300. It may be that the reporting about this incident isn't true, but if it is true, then that should be all the proof you need.

There is less than a 1 in 1000 chance that 100 or more units out of a population of 300 units would fail if the general failure rate of Xbox 360s is less than 25%.

I'm not so sure of that. I've offered evidence that three out of four newly purchased 360s manufactured after April of '06 are faulty. The two faulty refurbs that I received were also both manufactured after April. I don't think time has fixed this problem . . .

 

I think there is always the possibility that failures tend to come in runs... I've worked in manufacturing before (though not in sophisticated electronics like this), and that often happens. If those 300 were from a serial production run, then half failing would certainly indicate a problem with that particular time of manufacturing, but the sample may not be temporally diverse enough to make further assumptions. MS need not have "recalled" a bad batch... they may simply have noticed very high return rates on certain production runs, and decided to deal with it passively if the runs were limited enough in quantity.

 

... if the samples are random, yes. If they're mostly units from early on (as many dev units are bound to be), possibly made before any unit was packaged for retail, then it's not a very representative sample.