Console Repair Company: Xbox 360 Faults “Endemic”

It may be a pain in the ass when the 3 rings of death happen but it's not the end of the world!! While the only useful solution is a temporary one that needs to be done every week or so, it works nonetheless. probably not the safest solution but one i'd happily risk than waste another £300.

Of course i am talking about the toweling of a 360. Many of you know it as the only way to make the big paperweight become a console again.

The idea of wrapping your 360 fully in a towel - vents and all - switching it on, and leaving it to overheat (massively) for 30 mins to an hour seems ludicrous and you wont believe it till you try it but it brought mine and two mates 360's back to life (albeit temporarily till you needed to do it again).

At least while they all seem to turn out to be faulty eventually, microsoft has managed to build the machine in a way thats somewhat manageable once it is broken.

This is really gonna be the splinter in the foot for Microsoft, it such a shame that it seem so many 360 are faulty, its put a black mark on a otherwise faultless console. I just hope that in a year or so, all this has been dealt with & ironned out. I got my 360 on day 1 (well i actually got 2, a core & a prem) & they are still going strong not a hitch (he says touching wood & holding a copy of the darkness) but out of say 10 friends who have 360's 4 of those have had @ least 2 faulty consoles.

I just wished they would come clean and more importantly fix the design faults in the 360, The PS2 had its fair share of problems when released but 18months after release and countless reports of failures MS needs to fix it quick.

With Halo3, GTA4, Acecombat 6, mass effect, eternal sonata all set for autum/winter I really dont want my 360 to break, and if it does I doubt I will fork out for another one.

“I would say we don’t have a high defect rate.”

now he wouldve said "we don't have a high defect rate" if they didnt have a high defect rate. turning hard facts into a matter of opinion is common in PR. this way he hasnt directly lied about them havign a lot of returns or pissed of his superiors by saying their consoles are a bit bobbins in build quality

what on earth causes this popular problem? is it just bad case design/componant placement causing overheating and subsequently the RROD? or is the thing just riddled with software and hardware problems that have innumerable possible configurations of malfunctions that could cause the RROD?

dagnabbit!

lol.. .. A minority can be 49% ... althoug im sure its not that high.. it could be 20%.. which is 1 out of 5.. and if I take my friends who have 360s its 2 out of 6.. so it sound like to me theres a problem..

Come see all the people upset over the defective xbox 360.
Recall. Recall. Recall the xbox 360.

http://www.xbox360defective.com

Please, send as much traffic to this site as you can, come tell your 360 experience.

“vocal minority” Bull F*#$*!% S@#$^! This appears to be the case with Microsoft, wonderful strategy for addressing the 360 unacceptably high failure rate. I am utterly amazed there's no sort of class action suit taking place already. My unit had been messing up since the fall's update, and it went downhill from there. I was lucky (unlucky) enough that my FEB/06 360 didn't die till JUN/07....oh shucks; no warranty left. Now they want $140 for a defective product purchased last year for $400, just so they can "fix" a design/manufacturing defect that should have been addresses long freaking time ago! The audacity!!!

Well i just got my 360 about 2 months ago and already it has destroyed my obilvion disk and started to load slow as hell this reminds me of my ps2 seems the only consoles i buy that last are the nintendo ones and my good old "very old" Dreamcast. I don't think i will be buying another one i mean it's 400 bucks F#+K that.

Ahhh! I'm soooo mad!

I've been a staunch supporter of the Xbox camp, and I love my 360. However, at only 17 months old it finally has the Red Ring of Death... for good. If revived it twice before; once when it was like 3 month old and once again when it was about a year old. Both times I simply unhooked everything, waited a few minutes, and bang! I was up and running again. But now it wont come on at all.

I feel dirty

The fact that microsoft is keeping quiet about return rate figures is proof enough that there are a lot of consoles being sent back. Just 2 days ago my console started displaying the dreaded 3 rings of death and whenever i try playing any of my games the console just freezes up. It seems to me that in the run-up to the release of the 360 microsoft cut corners thus sacrificing quality for quantity and now they are paying the price.

Yeah there are problems with the console and that sucks! The biggest problem I think is that there is more than one issue with it. 3 red lights... faulty dvd drives... overheating... power brick probelms. On the whole though I think they have sorted most stuff out now and its just the 3 red lights issue.

What I dont get though is why when it happens people dont just call up Microsoft and get them to replace it. Thats what Ive done every time (3 times now). Even got the last one replaced free of charge, courier collect and deliver, outside my 1 years warranty. They dont even ask you when you warrant ends!

If that failed, trip down to Tesco or Asda, buy a new one, swap them over, then return it to them saying its faulty and get your money back. If these multi-billion pound/dollar corporations try and f**k the little guy, just f**k them back!

Alexhooren, that's just not true. Mine died about 2 weeks ago and the first thing they did was check my warranty and told me that I'd have to pay $140.00 to get their defect fixed.

Ummm, manage a defect on a $400 piece of hardware? Seriously, some people just need to listen to themselves OR at the very least have someone read out loud what they have written so they can see how illogical they are being. If its broken it is broken and needs to be fixed. Just to clarify, the towel trick usually only works for an additional hour of play before you have to do it again. It is so temporary that it has become a way for people to get their systems working for just long enough to trade it into game stores and get around $200 in-store credit for their broken system. Just a heads up for those people thinking of saving a couple dollars by buying a used system.

Might be interesting for a thread to be created asking do you know someone in real life, in your social circle who owns a 360 and has not had a problem with it.

My story:
Console was out of warranty, but as a "goodwill" gesture they will still repair for free.

Well I got my console back last week, apparently a DVD drive fault. They nicely put in a card for 30 days free of xboxlive (compensation for the time when I couldn't use live due to lack of console).

Connect it up as per usual, tried booting the console using wireless controller. Didn't work. Thought nothing of this at first, so I resynchronized controller and it appeared to work.

Then I try connecting to Live. I'm using an official wireless NIC, which worked fine prior to repair. Nothing, nada, zilch, zip. Turns out the MAC address of the NIC had changed. Bizarre as only the DVD drive had been changed.

So anyway it appeared to be working.

Next day I try to turn the console on, I get a cycle of green lights on the console and nothing. Just a static light showing there is power to the console. Powering off and on the console gets it to boot properly. Once the console has "warmed up" it appears to restart fine until it cools down again.

Over the next few days I test this, try using the power button on the front of the console, start the xbox using a wired controller etc, still the same thing.

Then I phoned up xbox support explaining this. How I never had any problems prior to the repair, etc.

I asked why the MAC address changed, they didn't know. I get the old standard script troubleshooting "Have you checked your cables" etc (Umm well yes as once it has warmed up it works fine).

We exhausted the troubleshooting and they gave the best piece of advice "leave it for a few days and see how you get on, monitor it to see if there is anything else wrong with the console"

Well that's great. I phone back a day later, and after troubleshooting they say the exact same thing.

Tried again today. This time said I'm really unhappy that no one is taking my complaint seriously. They are now picking it up again, and are giving me a free game as compensation.

See what happens when I get it back in 20 days....

That is because they sent you a different xbox 360. When I had to get mine fixed I wrote down all the information and guess what happened when it came back? The numbers were not the same it was not my xbox it was a different one that they had rebuilt. I had to reset all the network info. I guess this is what they do you send it in they send you a different one they fix. I called about this and got the run around about it how it was mine even though I gave them the info mine had and the info on the one returned. I have decided to just get rid of it altogether now

Possibly internally, externally it still had the same serial number etc...