Repairs, returns, and reimbursements for the XBox 360 game console is costing Microsoft an estimated $1 billion, as reported by the BBC news service.

The now infamous "3 red lights of death" general hardware failure problem is now being addressed publicly and on a corporate level, although the exact number of affected machines is still not known.

And Microsoft isn't the only next-gen console manufacturer facing the heat (warning: bad pun coming up). Rumours that Sony's Playstation 3 is allegedly prone to overheating (a claim the electronics giant denies) lowered share prices of the publicly traded company prior to the release of the PS3 last year.

I learned my lesson with the original PS2... got it when it first came out, only to find out a couple of years later that the first batch of models couldn't properly read dual-layer DVDs, which meant that I couldn't play certain, later games that were printed on dual-layer DVDs (God of War, NBA 2K6). The annoying thing was that there was no reasonable way around the problem... it wasn't covered by the warranty (which had expired by then, anyway) and even if Sony were willing to replace it with a new unit, the shipping and handling charges cost almost as much as a new "slimline" PS2 (and buying a new one meant I wouldn't have to wait the 4-6 weeks for the replacement to ship). Anyway, no more early-adoption for me... not getting Windows Vista and DirectX10 (ever, if I can help it, but if I have to make the change, I'll make sure it's at least up to SP1 status) and no PS3 or XBox 360 until at least maybe the second or third hardware production cycle. 

i'm on my fourth 360, my first got 3 red lights just over a month after purchase, the second didnt work right out the box, and the third had a disc drive malfunction 3 weeks after i got it

This is why I never buy technology when it first comes out.  You never know if it'll a) be vaporware or b) have bugs that didn't get caught during testing.

The last console that I invested in was an Atari 2600 in 1986.  ^_^ The PC is too versatile, too hackable and easily modified to convince me that a fairly closed-system box is worth my $200-600 (before purchasing overpriced games that don't already come with the system), despite the eye candy.  Besides, my eyes are too old and too accustomed to calm, slow, gradual contemplation of visible minutiae to follow those fast-paced, hi-res, hyper-realistic, NC-17-rated, pimped-out, explode-in-your-Chevy-Chase, first-person shooters.  These sentiments come, of course, from a fellow who largely cut his teeth on C-64 text adventures and round-driven computer RPGs (not to mention online MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs, etc.) after years of paper-and-pencil RPGs.

In other words, my sincerest sympathies to those who spent good money on malfunctioning or capacity-limited consoles, but, personally, I think those machines can go hang.   :o

ow_tiobe_sb
Phantom Bunburyist and The Prat in the Hat

Quote from: ow_tiobe_sb on July 06, 2007, 06:39:20 AM
The last console that I invested in was an Atari 2600 in 1986.  ^_^ The PC is too versatile, too hackable and easily modified to convince me that a fairly closed-system box is worth my $200-600 (before purchasing overpriced games that don't already come with the system), despite the eye candy.  Besides, my eyes are too old and too accustomed to calm, slow, gradual contemplation of visible minutiae to follow those fast-paced, hi-res, hyper-realistic, NC-17-rated, pimped-out, explode-in-your-Chevy-Chase, first-person shooters.  These sentiments come, of course, from a fellow who largely cut his teeth on C-64 text adventures and round-driven computer RPGs (not to mention online MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs, etc.) after years of paper-and-pencil RPGs.

In other words, my sincerest sympathies to those who spent good money on malfunctioning or capacity-limited consoles, but, personally, I think those machines can go hang.   :o

ow_tiobe_sb
Phantom Bunburyist and The Prat in the Hat

You, my dear sir, have become my new idol. Just after the gingerbread man (I mean, come on, who wouldn't want to be a portable snack?)

Quote from: ow_tiobe_sb on July 06, 2007, 06:39:20 AM
The last console that I invested in was an Atari 2600 in 1986.  ^_^ The PC is too versatile, too hackable and easily modified to convince me that a fairly closed-system box is worth my $200-600 (before purchasing overpriced games that don't already come with the system), despite the eye candy.

Funny, I seem to be on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Used to be a die-hard PC guy, read all the industry mags, and actually dreamt of one day working at NVIDIA making videocards but the technology turnover was just too much at some point (I think this was around the turn of the century) that I just decided that I was done keeping up with the upgrade game (I think it was at the time that video card and RAM pricing shot through the roof and it actually cost more to upgrade my PC than to buy a console). The other thing that pushed me into the console-gaming camp was the fact that the first-person-shooter (formerly a PC-only gaming genre) was finally making a decent transition towards the console, but it seemed like none of the console-limited games genres that I enjoyed (fighting games/action games) were making a jump to the PC.

I still game on the PC, mind you, but only to play older games that I can't play anywhere else (Half-Life 2, the original Rainbow Six tactical FPS games... not the arcade-y fluff they've got on the XBox 360 these days). 

Here's an interview with Micrososft's XBox chief Peter Moore regarding the widespread machine failures. The interesting thing to note here is that Moore doesn't talk about the possible cause of the failures, and doesn't confirm or deny that it might be a flaw in the manufacturing or even the design process.

Thing is, it's been a while now since gamers and armchair experts linked the RROD ("Red Rings of Death") to heat-related issues.

Here's an excerpted comment posted in response to a DailyTech XBox 360 preview article from November of last year:

QuoteSeems as if a fan failure (or blockage of the inlet air passage) could potentially cause catastrophic failure of the critical silicon without effective thermal protection.

Any idea of the nature and effectiveness of the thermal protection -- or wanna carry out a potentially destructive test by blocking up the inlet air on your presumably-rare Xbox360? An important issue for the TYPICAL technically-naive purchaser of the Xbox360, who is likely to be very careless about the Xbox360 ventilation and certainly will forget to regularly clear the inlet air-holes of sticky crud and junk. And what about the close-packed-finned heat-sink on the CPU? Such heat sinks on PC CPUs fill up completely with lint after about 6-9 months in a typical home environment. The Xbox360 is DELIBERATELY built to be non-user accessible for cleaning or any other purpose. A very big mistake. The internal air-duct should have been built on to a user-removable cover to expose the heat-sinks and fans for routine cleaning. I have had my share of cleaning out PCs (edit: heat-sinks) that have become completely blocked up with crud, the first obvious symptom being erratic shut-down of the CPU by the motherboard thermal protection. The Xbox360 dissipates a lot of power in the core silicon --- much more than the old Xbox.

At present, I highly recommend taking a 2-year extended replacement warranty on the Xbox360, so that WHEN ( not IF) the heat-sinks fill up with junk (or the fans fail) and the box begins to function erratically, the owner can get a brand-new one

And this comment was made just on the basis of the photos and diagrams that came with the original article.

Here's a later comment by the same poster, in response to the news of the extended warranties:

Quotethe disastrous positioning of the CPU and GPU heatsinks in close-proximity to the DVD-drive, probably systematically overheating it in normal use and certainly overheating it after the heatsinks get blocked up with lint, sticky crud and dog and cat hairs. Notice that nice hand-warmimg game-disk after a few hours of playing a 3D-game? DVD-drives do not like heat any more than hard-disks.

And this new 3-year warranty does not solve the fundamental design problems. It just delays the customer-whines. The poor user who has a failure will probably get somebody else's patched-up box in exchange (and still with the same fundamental design flaws).....certainly not a new one, regardless of any future design improvements. Also, with the new 3-year warranty, is Microsoft now going to reimburse all those Xbox360 owners that took out 3rd-party extended warranties?

Recommendation: Open up your Xbox360 (if you still have one that is trouble-free....) the day when the warranty expires and thoroughly clean the internals. ( Sorry, can't do it beforehand-- breaks the warranty-seal) Repeat the exercise every six months.

BTW, the addition of an extra GPU heatsink in the Xbox360 Elite is a giggle since it does not address the real problems. When (NOT if) the main heatsinks block up with crud, that extra heatsink will be totally starved of forced-air.