The British Broadcast Corporation’s top consumer program, Watchdog, has highlighted problems with faulty Xbox 360s, after the program was inundated with complaints about Microsoft’s games console.

“The world’s richest man and Microsoft boss Bill Gates called it the Ferrari of home entertainment. But we’ve had nearly 250 complaints from people who think it’s more of a clapped-out old banger,” Watchdog stated on its official web site.

Worse yet, consumers have reported to Watchdog that problems often occur once the one-year warranty has run out, which means that they have had to pay to get the problems fixed.

Two individual cases reported by Watchdog typified the kinds of problems that Xbox 360 owners were experiencing:

“Alex Ainsow had no problems for a year. But, just after the warranty ran out, his Xbox 360 wouldn’t stop crashing. He had to pay £85 for the repair. His second Xbox 360 lasted three days before it got the ‘three red lights’ – a hardware failure known in the gaming community as the ‘ring of death’.

“Craig Jenkins also got the ‘ring of death’ when his Xbox 360 was just two months out of warranty. He’s been told he’ll have to pay £80 to get it fixed.”

Ainsow has since received a new Xbox 360 from Microsoft.

Microsoft maintains that most people with an Xbox 360 have an “outstanding experience”, and that there’s no “systemic issue”. The company says it looks at each incident case-by-case, and does its best to help when problems do arise.

The British do have an interesting turn of phrase. The Xbox 360 has been called a lot of things, but never a “clapped out old banger”.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 4:23 pm under Microsoft.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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