Two thumbs down for Microsoft

Filed Under (Rants & Raves) by Stiffler on 24-10-2008

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Raise your hand if you are sick of Microsoft! What the hell are these guys doing? Aside from having a completely bogus OS, they have entered into the arena of gaming. From all the millions of complaints that have been lodged and users around the world suffering from things like RROD, the last thing we want is to deal with incompetent customer service people. Now I guess some credit has to be given to Bill Gates for having Xbox live support. But seriously…where the F*** do they find these people?????

The other day I had an issue with my profile and was unable to use my pre-paid card to login in to Xbox live gold. I was lucky enough to get on the phone and talk to a real life agent instead of that idiot MAX that greets you. Turns out that there was some discrepancy between my phone number and the account. I had to spend 1.5 hours on the phone only to have this issue escalated to 4 different agents to find out that they needed a working phone number in order for the account to be considered active. Are you kidding me?!?!? why didn’t they tell me this from the get go and save me and themselves the time?

Who knows how MSFT trains there staff but some one needs a kick in the nuts over there. Console gaming is suppose to be easy. Simply push and play. If I wanted the headaches I would go back to the PC. Oh wait…that uses windows… DAMNIT!

Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death (RROD)

Filed Under (Rants & Raves) by Stiffler on 19-09-2008

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Well the day has finally come Red Ring of Death has hit my xbox 360. Sitting at home the other day I decided to watch a dvd on my system, all of a sudden the scene on the movie froze. At first it almost seemed like there was a scratch on the dvd or glitch so I decided to eject the movie and check the disc just to make sure that blockbuster didn’t give me a dud. Imagine my surprise when the movie came out looking like I had just purchased it from the store. It was flawless not even a spec of dust on the disc. So I shut the xbox off and turned it back on with the disc in tray ready to play. Fast forwarding to the scene I was previously viewing, the disc started to play and once again froze in the exact same spot. I went through this procedure another 3-4 times and on the last time I looked at the power button and noticed that 3 of the 4 LED lights had turned red! WTF?!?!? I remember hearing or reading something about this on a forum a long time ago, but since I have owned my xbox 360 for over a year and a half I figured I was one of the lucky ones.

That’s it I called the hot line to find out what the hell was going on. After spending 5-7 minutes going through the stupid menus with my friend MAX I finally got in touch with a rep. We tried some trouble shooting techniques and I will admit that at this point in time I was still somewhat optimistic. By the time I pulled the hard drive off to balancing the system with tooth picks wrapped it in a towel and done some voodoo the agent informs me that I have to send it in. You can only imagine how pissed I must have been at this time.

After going over my information and verifying my address the agent informs me that they will send a pre-paid Purolator box for me to mail back my system. Four days later in the mail the box arrives I pack it up and ship it off. Now here comes the best part of the whole story. After sitting around waiting for over 2 weeks I receive a phone call from the call center asking me to do a survey about quality and customer services. ARE YOU KIDDING ME…DOES MICROSOFT REALLY THINK I AM HAPPY? Needless to say I gave the customer service agent a good rating since it is not their fault Microsoft built a less than quality machine. But when it came time to the service questions I made sure to let them know how un happy I am.

After about another week I receive a call from Purolator to notify me that I have a package waiting at the pick up center. So gladly I go down to sign for it and bring my Xbox home. After opening the box and setting it back up on the 46” Sharp I read a letter that Microsoft put in there. The letter pretty much read “Hi since we built a less than quality product we were unable to fix it and have had to replace it with another console”.

What ticks me off the most in the whole situation is, WHY DIDN’T YOU SAVE ME THE HASSLE AND JUST LET ME RETURN THIS TO THE STORE? Microsoft should have some sort of agreement with the retailer saying that if you receive the following list of defects please accept the system back and give out another console at our expense.

So to sum it up I waited 3 weeks for a system they could not fix only to have it replaced by them. I should have known better…I mean this is the company that got us to use windows. Never again Bill, never again.