Microsoft - DO NOT BUY AN XBOX 360

I always try and tell you the companies I like but today I have to say how disappointed I am in Microsoft. As you may or may not be aware Microsoft set aside a billion dollars to repair bad xbox 360's and increase the warranty from one to three years due to 30% to 50% of their units expierencing problems.

I thought I had gotten lucky and gotten one of the good units which i purchased in July of 2006. The last couple weeks I began having problems with the screen freezing, I hoped it owuld go away, it did not. It culminated yesterday in the unit flashing three red lights which upon research online I determined this was the indicator of a general hardware failure, the problem for which microsoft set aside a billion dollars.

I called Microsoft customer service and naturally got an indian. Of course, you can never get an american customer service associate. Well, the associate determines it is a hard drive problem not covered by warranty and I would need to buy a new hard drive.

So off I went to Best Buy, and a $140.00 later had what was supposed to fix the problem. Well, naturally it did not solve the problem.

So, now an addition to a bad xbox, I now had an opened, useless, new hardrive.

So, back I called Microsoft. First, they told me just to return the harddrive, well Best Buy will not give a refund because it is opened and two, the best they will do is give me an exchange for the same thing. What good does that do?

Second, Microsoft says because this happens only sometimes they will not do the free repair, they want another $100 and it will take four weeks to fix.

So, one DO NOT BUY AN X-BOX 360!

And further, Microsoft has admitted they built a bad product, quite frankly, they should have done a massive recall and exchanged it for a new system or refunded the money.

I had an expierence like this back in the mid 90's with Dell and it was 12 years before I gave Dell a second chance. It will be a long time before I give Microsoft another opportunity.

Buyer beware I guess!