News First man sues Microsoft over Xbox 360

the most that happens if i shift my pc while its playing a dvd or something is that the video skips, it does not gouge a massive track in the disc....
that is definately not normal

 

The question is, when you shift your PC, do you completely change the axis in which the disc is spinning? I can't see many people shifting their PC towers onto the side while a disc spins in the drive.

 

So if they replace hardware, when are they going to replace Faulty Software?

Anyone who has played with Gyros or know how the work will know why the disks get gouged, but this wouuld be easy to fix, Don put things close enough to the disk that it can cause that much damage if the disk changes its orbit slightly.
I have moved my PS2 from Vert to Horo to Vert again whilst my brother was playing, and nothing happened. I was also playing tekken one time and Xander (A little kid of a family freind) ran through the controler cables and knocked the console to the floor, I was not happy. But I could still play the game no problem, cept the tray wouldnt open.

 

Same thing happened with me, cept one of the times it happened it gouged a huge ring (it was like a 3 foot drop) in the disk, oddly the thing still works. For all the people complaining about first gen ps2's being horrible, mines lasted dusty vents, about 5 drops, traveling eveywhere, being left on for hours on end, ect.

But what causes the disk gouging is obvious, i wish i had the site that showed the pictures, but its caused by two grey metal plates on either side of the laser (a few inches on each side) that are right below the disk.

 

Would be interested in that picture. In the AnandTech article when they took apart a 360, the DVD drive was a sealed unit produced by Hitachi. Wonder if the disc gouging drive is from them or another manufacturer?

 

wow that was one hell of a demonstration why u never move anything that has a spinning cd in it unless its meant to be moved while on. the same thing happens to discs in my ps2 if i move it while its on. although the scratch isn't as bad and i get no cool noises it makes the disc useless none the less. i actually called sony about it as it happened with a new ps2. they told me that moving the console while it was on was not proper use and it was not a manufacturing flaw so sod off. well ok that didn't say sod off but i could tell it was definately implied. anyways my 360 runs great and i know at least 6 other people that have them and no complaints. one of my friends works at compusa(its a us retail chain don't know if they have them across the pond), they only sold 3 premium bundles and 4 cores. the shipment was larger but the owner of fedex shops at the store i wnet to and he bought 3 premiums before they were even on sale. they did have one return but when thay played it in the shop and i was told that's all they did when it came back and they couldn't get it to crash they tried to. i'm impressed with the 360 its the first thing i have ever bought from ms that was worth what i spent on it. i have gotten so much use out of it i would have spent more. i use it way more than my old xbox. i stream movies and music from my pc all the time. the games are a little on the scarce side as far as variety but i'm impressed with the ones i've played. one thing i don't get is why this is constantly being compared to a pc its not, its a game console. of course u can build a pc with a faster cpu and graphics but how much will it cost? my high end gaming pc put me in the whole $3000/1500 pounds when it was all said and done. my 360 only cost me $499 +games and controllers. the price difference is huge and for a non pc gamer this is the bleeding edge. if u liked the xbox get your paws on a 360. its the xbox done right!

 

Again, I see too much of an "Anti-lawyer" sentiment here. It's like you people see a court case, and you automatically assume it's pointless, and yet another case of small, insignificant people trying to leech off of the big guys...

At any rate, when one buys something, one usually gets a guarantee with it. At the very least, it's that the unit purchased will actually serve the purpose that it was sold to do. However, when things go wrong... That's the whole reason that replacements are offered.

Of course, here is where we run into problems. First of all, you can't replace an Xbox 360 right now. There just simply aren't any units availible. In-store credit is a lame excuse for a refund; when I come to return a $400US console, I didn't originally plunk down $400US for any old items in the store, I paid them for something in specific. And at any rate, that's a time when you didn't have that money, and you should know that the way business works, even if you're not spending it, holding money itself has value. Hence, even a full cash refund is a sub-par replacement for the console; they've had your money for that long, and you've already spend a deal of time on the whole debacle, and time is money.

As for Microsoft, if they knowingly produced a faulty product, which can even to knowingly made choices that significantly compromised the quality of their products, without informing their potential customers, it is a form of fraud. One is supposed to sell the product one advertises. Hence, depending on exactly what evidence this guy has, Microsoft may potentially be liable in this case. Then again, they likely may not, and at any rate, the court will almost certainly NOT find them liable.

 

Cliffy B already stated that it is only running off one core, and yes I know you won't see 3x the performance, but you could still do alot more with the 2 cores not being used. Not to mention it will still look better than a 900 dollar system (Decent eMachines computers run 500 + the 400 for the console). And there is no way to say that pc will catch up, simply because of programming.

How long has 64 bit been out, but how much support do you see for it? In addition the fastest 64 bit dual core only runs at 2.4ghz in reality, not 3.2ghz. PC will get some great games of course, but they can now be ported using XNA faster than ever, not to mention the 360 should have a larger audience while pc gaming is on a decline despite some great games that have come out.

The only game I really see the huge need for a PC for would be an RTS, just because you really NEED all of the keys. But as time goes on those devices can easily be implemented on a console.

 

There's also another major title for the Xbox 360 that has been fairly illuminating to the power of the Xbox 360. It would be The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. In spite of what they've directly told the press, informally, the developers of the game have let it be known that unlike other games, Oblivion DOES actually push the console to the max, or pretty close to it. Yes, that means that the console is going to be maxed out by a game not too long after the hardware's release, whenever the game arrives. (1Q 2006) And from that description, a $900US system could very possibly run it better. And you are correct in saying that there is no way for the PC to catch up, because it was never behind to begin with.

As for the processor, if you paid attention to the specs on it, the reason it achieves such a high clock rate is because the PPE arcitecture, compared to the PowerPC arctecture that was the "parent" of it, it has a very long instruction pipeline. This allows for the CPU's clock speed to easiyl be increased, though it comes at a cost of performance. Recent benchmarks have shown that doing this only sends you BACKWARDS, as the comparison between a Pentium M and a Pentium 4 reveal; Intel's most powerful CPU is the Pentium M. In other words, each of those cores is exceptionally weak compared to a PC multi-core processor. And for future reference, the fastest 64-bit dual-core CPU for the PC DOES run at 3.2GHz; it's the Intel Pentium D 840. Note the mention of "EM64T," the sign of a 64-bit Intel processor. As for the audience size, it's still comparable, and is actually expected to rebound to be much larger than before, particularly after the launch of Windows Vista.

 

The x360 is the celeron of the next-gen consoles....

 

I wonder what happens to all the idiots who paid through the nose for one on ebay and may not know where the unit was originally purchased or who may live too far away to make a return. This can be especially poignant if someone suckered you into buying a package deal with a bunch of games that may now be gouged from colliding with the laser. How can those people make an exchange when the original retailer may be 1000 miles away? You think the ebay sellers are going to help these people out when Microsoft CS tells them to return the unit to where they got it? Hell, no!

As for the performance issue, a very long instruction pipeline works both ways. If the CPU is really good at predicting what data it is going to need or where the next branch will lead, and has what it needs in the pipeline, it can go wickedly fast. During times when it guesses wrong a lot, it has to empty the pipeline and start over again with each bad guess, which can be unbearably slow.

 

One one way, yes; the celeron's primary feature is the tiny L2 cache, and for the Xbox 360, it has the lowest L2-cache-per-core ammount of any multi-core CPU ever designed so far; the dual-core Pentium Ds, for instance, split a whole 2MB between two cores, while the Athlon64 X2s have either 512KB or 1MB PER CORE. Meanwhile, the Xbox 360 only gets 1MB to split between 3 cores, and the comments that 256KB would be set aside for a "dynamic generation buffer" or something like that, would mean a total of 256KB of real cache per core; the same as most Celerons. This could be troublesome for really CPU-intensive games, I think. I don't recall the ammount of L2 for the Cell, (8MB total pops to mind, though it may be in error) but speculation strongly suggests that Nintendo has pushed for a LOT of L2 on its processor, possibly a whopping 2MB per core, however many it might have. I just hope that this is something that can be worked with here, and that the troubling performance of Oblivion on the Xbox 360, (while it performs excelently on inexpensive PCs; the developers of that game are providing equal-quality PC screenshots using 3.0GHz P4s and Radeon 9800pro cards) is just perhaps a fluke, or something unique among games, and not a sign that worse is to come...

 

Hi,

I'm a newby, does anyone know where I can get a 360 xbox

tina.....

 

Ebay ***

 

When I bought my PS2 when it first came out, it scratched all my disks as the DVD trays where faulty. I got a replacement and Game even replaced all my games even though I didnt buy them from them and some where second hand . And if you remeber the PS2 didnt work upright.

Theres always faults with everything when they fisrt come out and fixed in the next revision/s. You wont get away from that. Goes for TV's Pc components the lot. No matter how long you delay its release, there will always be something thats missed.

So im no supprised at all that the first 360's have faults. Id expect it.

 

Holy thread revival!

Dude, look at the date, please

 

So? If he has something to say... Why does it matter? The thread doesn't appear to have died through flaming or trolling. If there's something to add, why shouldn't he post. If everyone else is also no longer interested in the topic, then the thread will die again. Otherwise we could have another interesting discussion.

 

I was searching through the threads looking for something interesting. I dont just read the latest threads when theres old ones that have been forgotten or I missed. Still relevant what I said

Better than starting a new thread or repeat/duplicate a thread