Pissed off with Microsoft

So that's another 360 that's been sent back to Microsoft.  I'll now be on my third Xbox in 10 months.  That's quite poor really.

I originally got my Xbox 360 for my birthday last year, August 2006.  It worked perfectly out of the box, and has done up until February time where it started freezing randomly but rarely. 

Then in May, enough was enough.  I sent the box back to Microsoft as it was just not working properly. 90% of the time, it'd crash within 15 minutes of playing.  That was real annoying.  So on the 3rd May, I sent my Xbox back to MS for repair under warranty.

On the 15th May, almost 2 weeks later, it returned, and I was ecstatic!  I couldn't wait to get home and play... worms!  Yeah, I'm hooked.

The little note that was in the box with my Xbox said that the motherboard had been found to be faulty and had been replaced!  How nice :)

I had that Xbox for 5 weeks before it went screwy again.  On the 24th June, the day after returning from holiday, I powered up Worms (last level!) and within 5 minutes, the Xbox froze. D' oh!

I Reset the Xbox, walked back to my sofa, sat down and stared in disbelief as my screen was black, and my Xbox was flashing it's 'Red Ring of Death' at me! Noooo!

So another phone-call to MS revealed another UPS label & another hunt for a box to send away.  I was also informed that I'd be waiting 20(ish) days.  I sent it Last Monday, which was the 25th May.  It was picked up by UPS.  And as far as i'm aware, that should be a quick delivery to 'Havant' Where the broken boxes go.

Alas, on Friday, 5 day's after sending the box, i receive an e-mail saying that they had received it.  Maybe it's not in Havant after all.

So now I'm stuck, with no Xbox360.  I plugged in my PS2 to try and get some gaming in over the weekend. I went through several games, and all where rubbish! The only one which held my concentration for more than 20 minutes was GTA:San Andreas, and even that got boring (which worries me about GTA IV!).  I've got several games on my original xbox which i could play, but it's hassle setting it up!  And my desktop PC is nowhere near any good for PC Gaming.  

So I figure i need some next-gen gaming.  What are my choices?  The 360 (obv).  The PS3 & the Wii.  I've played the Wii, and I can pretty much agree with Matt Brett that the Wii is quite poor.  I've got no interest in the PS3 as the games seem rather poor (maybe they'll get better?).  Which leaves me with the 360.

Hmm.  Many people are reporting an error rate of 30%.  So far for me, it's a big fat 100% error rate.   Yet, my brothers 360 is a launch box, and that's had no trouble!

How can i stick with a fantastic system (360) but crap hardware?  I've kind of lost all faith in the Microsoft hardware. I'm pretty certain that my 360 will be going back to MS a few more times, and I'm certainly not willing to pay £80 to get it fixed each and every time!!

Why aren't Microsoft addressing the problems though? So many people have reported the problems regarding heat. From what I've read (i forget where), the heat ends up warping the motherboard which in-turn, breaks the connections and this creates a fault.  There's also stories of MS installing newer more efficient heat-sinks into newly repaired 360's to curb the problem! 

Let's hope that this new heat-sink idea works and my 360 doesn't have to return to "Havant" (read: Prague).

Rant over. meh