XBox 360 launch and problems
I’ve not been big into console games. The last computer we had that directly connected to the TV all the time was an old Atari 400. (Which I occassionaly wax nostalgic for…) Anyway, the XBox 360 is the recently released big new upgrade to the XBox from Microsoft and there are a couple of interesting reports out about it today. For one, Business Week is reporting on the likely loss that Microsoft is taking on each unit (they seel for $399), they’ve looked and think that MS is losing a bit over $100 on each one. The goal of course, is to make money off the games. There is worse news though for some XBox 360 new owners.
I’ve seen lot’s of reports that there is frequent/random locking and freezing with a significant number of the console’s. It sounds like people are getting errors at various stages. (At bootup, in game play, etc.) Many of the complaints are showing up at xbox-scene.com. Some would say it’s so new, that those with working consoles probably aren’t online talking about the fact that it’s working. There does seem to be a significant amount of anecdotal evidence that there’s a problem with the these. There’s no real way yet to get an idea of what percentage are affected, or if it’s a similar root cause.
In the forums at xbox-scene there are many posts with people asking about error E64, E 74, E 79 and more… An article is up at xbox-scene here.
The problem seems to affect a variety of games and the users seem to have the default settings. More in the teamxbox.com forums
At this moment, there are 99 replies to a “Defective XBOX does anyone else have one?” post in the Xbox-scene hardware forum
Even further… judging from the forum posts tech support for the XBox 360 is overloaded today. (1-800-4-my-xbox) Reports of 3 hours waits on hold, and promises of sending techs onsite to look at the problem boxes. One person reported a 3-4 week turnaround on replacements. It’s sounding like hardware failure may be the issue in some of these.