All Things Microsoft > Microsoft Hardware

360 Fail: the Latest Chapter

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worker201:
http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/microsoft-faces-new-xbox-360-reliability-accusations/1274293

Apparently, an Xbox 360 can scratch your game discs if you turn the machine sideways while it is running.  Duh.  Jason Johnson is suing Microsoft for $50K because 3 of his discs were scratched.  The litigation might seem ridiculous, but the development process documents Microsoft presented to the court indicated that MS knew about the problem from the very beginning, and even considered fixing it before shipping.  Supposedly, adding rubber cushions to the drives would have cost $0.50 per unit to install.  This doesn't seem like much, but remember that the 360 probably cost Microsoft a shitload more than retail price to produce - we all know that consoles are sold as loss leaders.

Lead Head:
It would have cost much more then $.50 cents per console if microsoft already had a few hundred thousand consoles made. My laptop does the same things to discs when if I actually have it in my lap with a disc in it. I have quite a few discs with a nice circular scratch in it. Should I sue both Toshiba and Dell?

_ZeroBeta:
Even with the XBox's terrible reputation in terms of its level of reliability, doesn't the same thing happen if you rotate any machine while it's running with a disc inside of it? My Matsui mini system sometimes scratches my CDs if I knock it accidentally while the disc is rotating inside it, and a number of my CDs have scratches of the same shape, although the scratches aren't deep enough to have much effect on the playability. But I have enough common sense to know that I shouldn't sue for my own mistakes.

Refalm:
The XBox 360 Slim isn't much better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdOjzuJByXg

Lead Head:
As much as Microsoft dropped the ball on the 360, what the hell do you expect? You have a fairly heavy disc (relatively speaking) that spins upto 10,000 RPM in a 16x DVD drive. You have huge gyroscopic effects at that speed. You move around a laptop with a disc at full speed and it does the exact same thing. If you take a desktop DVD drive out of the computer's case and move it around with a disc in there while its spinning and it will do the exact same thing. You could probably clamp the disc hub down with 75 pounds a pressure and the disc itself will probably just distort and smash the tray if you tried to move it around.

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