Firstly its not worth paying for a service I rarely use, most friends being games developers don’t actually play on the xbox they play PC games, as work provides them some uber box.

Secondly as I said before now I’m on my fourth dead xbox 360 I will not send good money after bad.  So no more money from me to MS.  If I want a game it’s the pre-owned market, this may have some effect on the newly purchased market but its minimal, I’m just not giving my money to a company that has blatantly screwed over its customers by not replaced the 360 with a newly designed working system and endlessly recycles MB’s doomed to failure, or so it would appear.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=4&entryid=1653

With the warranty period due to end this year can you really blame me ? 

I cancelled my OneCare renewal as well, due to high cost and this episode has tainted my dealing with Microsoft. 

With blu-ray the winner, the PS3 is looking mighty tempting, just sort out that emotion chip and slap a big drive in it and I’ll buy it tomorrow, oh and make it smaller and quieter and use less electricity and paint it white or silver and and build in that digital tv-tuner*2.

Technorati tags: xbox 360, xbox live cancelled

In my comments of a previous post it was suggested that I might get the new version with hdmi ports and better fans, well no such luck.  This is now my fourth xbox 360 and two Christmas holidays curtailed,  I could be a drama queen and say ruined but it is only a console, but my son was not chuffed by a long shot, to him it was pretty dire.  Taking that into consideration it would be the least that they could do. 

Apparently not the least they could do is repair it, (new mother board, new dvd drive) and give me a months subscription to Xbox live gold.  Big Whoop!  I already have a gold subscription to live.

The design of the 360 is at fault, instead of fixing it and doing right by customers an endless stream of recycling repairs seems to be going on as its probably cheaper than issuing proper replacements with new MB layouts.

Xbox tech peeps feel free to complain about my harshness in the comments, then just remember I’m on my 4th, two work colleagues are on their 5th and 7th. 

So what can I do about it, well nowt it would appear as it is guaranteed to 2009, but what about after that ?  So far it would seem a repaired xbox has a single year lifespan before breaking down again. I have one more year of repairs and then I’m on my own. 

What am I going to do, well I’m still not sure, there are games on the xbox that my son loves, Kameo for one, well done Rare this is a corker and we revisit it over and over again.  This prevents me from just selling the thing on eBay.  So I’m stuck with it for a while a least.

However I decided that I can no longer invest in anything else for such an unreliable product.  In march my subscription to live will be cancelled.  I will not buy any more games for this console, if I do they will be second hand pre-owned games after a long enough period so that they are as cheap as possible.

Any one else having similar problems, consider doing the same, you may not wish to cancel your live subscription, but choose to buy second hand games from a reliable source (one that guarantees they work).

I gave serious thought to getting a PS3, but I can only get hold of a 40gb version which does not do backwards compatibility (xbox makes don’t feel smug about this your backwards compatibility sucks too), Europe was severely screwed by Sony in not delivering a unit with the emotion chip in it, but at least they are screwing the rest of the world now.  So until a version is released with backwards compatibility to PS1/PS2 with a larger storage capacity, 40gb come on, 1/2 gig drives are cheap as chips nowadays, I ain’t buying one.

I cancelled my OneCare account too, not just out of spite but cos I never really felt it worked.