Why I'm not Buying a One - My Rant

[Michael-5]

Adinnieken said:

Michael-5 said:

Most of my 360 issues are RRoD related. The console would freeze regardless of what I was playing, and often froze in the dashboard. I used to play off both a USB/HDD, and it didn't matter if I only had 1 plugged in at the time, it still froze.

One of the 360 consoles MS replaced mine with wouldn't play disks which I had DLC for. It also wouldn't play online for half my games at random. Was a weird issue, had to spend 2 hours on the phone with MS and Bell, just to get MS to admit fault.

I used the same HDD on all 3 of my consoles, and now I have a larger HDD because my friend upgraded to the non-compatible Slim (Another reason to dislike MS). If this new console starts to freeze often I'll try to play off USB like you said. Actually, because I play at my friends quite often, my account is always on my memory card, so I don't really use my HDD all that much, unless I'm playing an installed game.

If the HDD is plugged in, it can cause the system to freeze.  When a HDD is present, the console will still use the HDD to cache graphical content regardless of where the game is played.  If the problem isn't exhibitted with the HDD you get from your friend, try putting your previous HDD back in and see if it fails once again.  If so, then pretty much guaranteed that you have a bad HDD.

Which reminds me, have you gone through the process of clearing the HDD cache?  I'm guessing you have as that is often standard practise in the basic support steps.

Right now, my 360 is running fine, but before, even when my HDD was unplugged, and I played off a USB it still froze. For me, it wasn;t an HDD problem, my motherboard was warped.

One of my friends, who know how to mod a 360, explained the issue to me. Apparently the original model 360's run a little hotter then they are suppose too, which makes the motherboard sag. MS being cheapo's only clip the motherboard on two sides, but if you clip all 4 sides, the 360 is pretty much guarenteed not to RRoD. Instead of doing a facotry recall, or spending $0.50 on new consoles (addressing the issue), MS just pretended like nothing was broken. They extended the warrenty to 3 years so they could artificially reduce the fail rate by claiming a lot of broken consoles aren't broken.

That to me is how I see the situation.

My put two extra clips in his original 360, and it's been perfect since Halo 3 (got the Halo 3 bundle). He showed my a warped mothboard and his, and yea....2 extra clips fixes everything.