30% Failure Rate?

[Hybrid]

http://gamer.blorge.com/2007/06/22/retailer-xbox-360-failure-rate-30/

Is this guy serious?

[F34R]

The first comment on that page sums it up pretty nicely.

Not to be a fanboy, but it seems like a biased article.

I notice the "source" is one manager of one EB games in Australia. He mentions 30%, but of that 30%, were all the returns from broken 360s?

For comparison purposes, I notice the manager said only 1 Wii was returned and 5 PS3s. How many PS3/Wiis total were there? It would be nice to compare percentages with percentages.

The rest of the article are opinons from random people. No authoritative sources. Dramatic angle though.

[F34R]

I felt this was important enough to add as another post, and not just edit my post above:

Another thing I've found is that the power supply could be causing a LOT of these people that claim they have went through multiple machines. It's not the power supply on it's own. It's the people that plug it into a crappy power source, cheapo surge protector, etc. I found one person that had 5 Xbox 360's red ring him. Each time, he received the 360 back, he plugged it back into the same exact place. I cheap power protector. This was reducing the amount of power, clean power, that was being put through to the 360, eventually causing a hardware failure. This could also be happening with the Nyko cooler. This kinda adds a little more validity that it's not always the 360 that fails.

[Hybrid]

Lethal mentioned this at the old 360F. My first 360 was connected to a cheap free after rebate surge protector. A few months later, it crashed. Now I am connecting it to a one I bought for $20 after rebates. It has never frozen or crashed on me yet.

[F34R]

I'd have never thought about it till this guy came to be about possibly repairing it for him, since he knew I do PC repair. I haven't ever done anything 360 related as far as repairs go. Hell, I haven't ever opened a 360 case lol.

I went through a few things I'd do to troubleshoot a PC, and that came out of the "interview". Normally when I get a call about a computer that reboots randomly, or turns off w/o any reason, I usually start with a few things: power cord short, power supply, and power source. We went over a few things to eliminate as much as we could, and after it was all said and done, we changed his power source. His new 360 is doing fine, and hasn't had any problems since making sure he's getting good, clean power to the 360.

Again, this isn't always the case..... I suspect it might be a lot of the problem when you see the same person going through console after console, after console.

[F34R]

Here is the original article that started this bull **** story. In it, there is a claim of "over a hundred emails", and one retailer in Aussie having problems. This hardly amounts to 4 million broken systems, since there are only a little over 200,000 systems in Australia.

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Home/D3Q7G8S2?page=1