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Bloggers throw Microsoft some heat.(The Way We See It)
CircuiTree August 1, 2007 | Jorgensen, Chris As the home video game wars heat up, Microsoft has found itself having to respond to angry consumers over failures to its Xbox 360s in the market. In reports surfacing the first week of July, Microsoft announced that it would have to extend its warranties on the Xbox 360, leading to a reported USD 1.15 billion in repairs that will hit the books in the fourth quarter–not good news to investors, and a blow to the company’s entertainment and devices division.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As of June, Microsoft reported having sold 11.6 million units, a tad below company expectations but still not bad–yet with the good news, some bad was also brewing. As it turns out, many of the gamers who waited for hours at the doors of their local Gamer’s Paradise or drove for hours to find a Wal-Mart or Best Buy that had them in stock were experiencing a high amount of hardware failures in the system. go to site how to fix the red ring of death
And those who have that amount of time to spend to find and purchase a gaming system, let alone the hours on end playing the games themselves, also have a lot of time to vent when their systems fail.
To the blogs!
As Microsoft tried to keep things under wraps until it determined the cause of the failures in the system, let alone how many systems in market were affected, it began to feel the pressure of the blogosphere, as sites such as www.teamxbox.com and www.xbox36fanboy.com began to report and continually cover the problems. Xboxers used the sites to not only report the instances, but to also get to the root of the problem.
The main failure has been dubbed by bloggers as the “red ring of death” for the ring of red lights that appear on the front of the gaming console–lights that are normally green. The first diagnosis offered–and one that most seem to support–was an overheat of some sort, which in turn led to some Xbox basement surgeries.
Three sites even got together and conducted their very own round robin test, purchasing and dismantling two units. Their diagnoses? They came to the conclusion that the system was indeed experiencing overheating and centralized the problem to the protective layer of the GPU heatsink’s heat transfer pad, which had not been removed during manufacture.
Elementary, my dear Watson? Not so fast. Other Xboxers came forward right away on the discussion boards and defended Microsoft’s decision to leave the indium foil on the pad, saying that Intel did something very similar on their P4 socket 478 heatsinks but they placed thermal compound on either side of the foil. So much for that….
Dismantles aside, some still gave Microsoft a hard time for remaining hush-hush about the red ring of death, but perhaps its nonactivity was a stroke of genious–albeit perhaps accidental. By sitting back and letting the gamers fight over the root cause of the problems, it may have spared itself countless man hours and other costs to get to the source of the problem alone.
Rather than starting from scratch, it now has an endless supply of documentation from the blogs and discussion boards. And when Microsoft is done reading, it can then mosey on over to YouTube to watch the gamers and surgeons in action, as they show complete deconstructs of the system, quick fixes (including smacking it on the side–that’s the American way!), and even more explanations as to why the systems overheat.
When Microsoft did respond–although it wouldn’t confirm an overheating issue–by extending warranties and preparing for more than one billion dollars in repairs, one would have thought that investors would have flinched, but, on the contrary, the Goliath’s price per share barely felt a chink in the armor. Searches on investor blogs for responses and thoughts on the Xbox debacle jived with the initial market response–not a peep to be found. go to site how to fix the red ring of death
But this story won’t go away for some time. As word continues to rumble on the Web, especially now that it is getting news coverage, Microsoft will no doubt have to continue its consumer responses.
To date, that first response was an open letter from Peter Moore, Microsoft corporate vice president, interactive entertainment business, entertainment and devices division, to the “Xbox community,” indicating the company’s awareness of the problem(s) and offering an enhanced three-year warranty to cover any Xbox experiencing the “red ring of death.” A letter welcomed by most in the Xbox community with open arms.
“Better late than never,” declared FreqGamerMiles7.
“Good job, Microsoft,” wrote NobodyzZero.
Good job, indeed.
Chris Jorgensen is the Publisher and Chief Editor for CircuiTree.
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Jorgensen, Chris
