Where Politics And Video Games Collide

[...] James Robertson has brought up a topic of consoles again. While I totally agree that reported failure rates are absolutely unacceptable and point to a problem in either hardware design or shoddy assembly, the other important side of the story that often gets overlooked is how Microsoft deals with these failures when they do occur. To be honest, I was a little concerned about the perceived failures when I bought my own Xbox 360 for Christmas, and those concerns grew into uneasy anticipation when I started seeing intermittent error messages during bootup before network adapter died completely. I pretty much expected the repair process to cost me a couple hundred dollars and countless hours spent on the phone, but actually that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s how the process worked (in my case, other’s may differ, but the chatter in blogosphere indicates similar experiences), [...]