Microsoft now receiving 2,500 broken 360s per day in UK alone? [News]
Uploaded By: Jay Filmer | Published at 15:32 (GMT) on Tuesday, June 26, 2007

New complaints claim out-of-country repair centres are now being used due to unprecedented demand

Microsoft’s UK repair centre in Havant is now redistributing faulty consoles to foreign repair centres in order to clear an overwhelming backlog and keep up with the 1,500 to 2,500 Xbox 360s arriving at its doors on a daily basis, according to customer reports.

According to Lee Sherman (Gamertag, Toxic Daywalker), who sent us details of his horrible experience, his Xbox 360 had been sent to Prague for repair, which has extended the repair time considerably.

He talks of how three weeks and repeated phone calls yielded no further clues to the status of his repair, with customer service representatives merely telling him that it would be “returned shortly”.

Lee even claims that when he asked to speak to the repair centre direct, he was told this wasn’t possible because they don’t have phones... However, using a directory enquiry service he was able to obtain the number for the repair centre, where he was shocked to learn that his console was actually in Prague, not Havant as Microsoft customer service reps had claimed.

Additionally, the call to the Havant repair centre revealed some other worrying stats: “A shocking statistic we found out though is that between 1,500 to 2,500 consoles get sent to Havant by three UPS lorries per day, to then be shipped to Prague for repair,” Lee told us, going on to add, “[We] phoned up Nora the [customer service] supervisor again, who then admitted my console was in Prague and hadn’t been looked at yet – she seemed amazed that we knew!”

Comments from users on the Xbox.com forum reveal similar woes, and some have also discovered their consoles are indeed in repair centres outside of the UK: “I just spoke to the customer support people because my 360 has been gone since the 8th of June,” says forum user, LordBrown in a post dated 23rd of June. “Apparently because of the backlog in Havant they’re sending 360s to repair centres outside the UK! And that because of this Microsoft are legally allowed an additional ten days to get your 360 back to you.”

From the sounds of things it seems Microsoft is fighting a losing battle on this front, as more and more units flood in for repair. It kind of reminds of that bit in Santa Claus The Movie when all of those defective wooden toys started falling apart…

We connected Microsoft this morning, however we’re still waiting for an official response. We’ll let you know the moment we hear anything.

Lastly, we’d also like to point you to our continuing Xbox 360 hardware failure survey, which is now approaching 5000 entries. Click here to head over and fill it out now, if you haven’t done so already.

Xbox 360 woes: owners experiencing video problems
Posted Jun 26, 2007 at 02:29AM by Sally B.
Listed in: News
Tags: Microsoft, Ring of Death

A new trend of Xbox 360 malfunction is cropping up, and it looks like it's going to rival the Ring of Death in terms of the number of people experiencing the same problem. Several Xbox 360 owners posted in the Xbox.com general discussion about a common video failure that they are experiencing - strangely enough - all at the same time.

The screen will be blacked out, they said, with white dots splashed all over the screen. Some posters also reported that they see green shadows - one of the symptoms of video card failure - before the video disappears. The audio remains unaffected.

Then it gets interesting. For some reason, all the people started having the same problem around the same time. Most of them were playing Forza Motorsport 2 before the screen blacked out (a few others were playing Halo 2).

The Xbox 360 users tried to figure out what may be causing the problem. Several placed the blame on faulty cables; some tried switching from High Definition to Standard Definition, but to no avail. A few posters chose to debunk the "blame the cables" theory. One of them was using component HD cables that came with the Premium box when he experienced the video blackout. He tried switching the cables with regular AV but he experienced the same problem.

Others put the blame on the hardware layout inside the Xbox 360 and poor ventilation, which was also what others surmised as the cause of the Red Ring of Death. A few mentioned the possibility of an Xbox Live update glitch, which may explain the reason why these people experienced the black screen around the same time.

Will this be another massive hardware issue that Microsoft has to deal with?

Xbox 360-fatal crashing bug in Forza 2?
Posted Jun 27, 2007 at 10:56AM by Ryan C.
Listed in: Xbox 360
Tags: Turn 10, Ring of Death

There's a certain thread in the Forza Motorsport 2 forums that's already reached a whopping 60 pages, and it's all about the random glitching, crashing and overall just weird behavior of the game while it's being played. While a few bugs and crashes can be chalked up to a careless glitch, there's even a few reports of the game actually causing owners' 360s to contract the all-too-horrifying red ring of death - which means that there's something not quite right with Forza 2. Let's dig a bit deeper to see what the posters are actually going through.

Reading the thread, we find out that the crashes happen randomly at any point in the game. Some posters report the game crashing during offline races, others while purchasing or painting new cars. A few even reported the game crashing even while there's no visible activity at all, such as during loading screens or just looking at your own cars.

It's to note that the users who have reported these incidents have made it clear that they've taken steps to ensure that their consoles have been properly taken care of and are very well-ventilated during play, as well as not having any problems of the sort with other high-end games for the Xbox 360.

Another alarming post comes from poster srt4turbo2004 - saying that Forza 2 has pretty much forced him to change consoles, with the same result of the game crashing. He also noted that the crashes are telegraphed by a grinding noise, a noise that occur ed even with a fresh-out-of-the-box console. Weird.

We can only hope that Turn10 addresses this issue and fast. Forza Motorsport 2 clearly has a lot of fans who want to enjoy the game as much as they could, and are disappointed that these crashes are preventing them from doing so. Updates as we get them.