// October 6th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Consoles
Alright I am not fan boy for any system, no matter what people say or think. I have both the PS3 and the 360 and I enjoy both. But Microsoft has crossed the line with what happened to me on Saturday.I am going to make this short and sweet. I bought a 2 year extended warranty through Microsoft when I got my 360. There was a little cardboard paper to fill out and mail back to them. So I did and about a month later I had the charge show up on my credit card and they sent me a card with a number on it. In the process of moving 2 years ago I misplaced the card. This shouldn’t be a problem one would think because when I got my 360 replaced in December I got a letter saying my warranty was good through 2011 and would be updated with my new 360 serial number. So I wasn’t too worried about losing the card.
A couple weeks ago I started getting random crashes in games and lock ups. Then I noticed one day that Madden was taking forever to load. I ended up disconnecting my hard drive and everything worked fine. Now when I reconnect it I get a E63 error every other time. This signals the hard drive is going bad. So with my 2 year extended warranty I should be covered until March 09 for a new hard drive (it should be under the 1 year warranty normally). So I called Microsoft Saturday and was told my warranty was over and that they would not replace it. I argued with the guy about having an extended warranty and he said he could not look it up or find it. So I hung up.
I went and found my credit card statement which has the warranty clearly spelled out with a reference number from Microsoft. So I figure this is proof and I can give this to them. I called back and after 3 transfers and 2 hours on the phone they tell me they can’t help me and I have to write a letter and mail it to Microsoft asking for a copy of my warranty. You have no idea how furious I am at this point.
So outside of a scathing letter I had to order a hard drive today so I can actually load games faster and hopefully move stuff from my memory card back to the hard drive and get some of my games off the old one if it will work long enough.
Between the horrible customer service and the hardware problems this has been a horrible experience for me. It’s one thing to admit there are some great games on the 360 and I’ve had a lot of fun with the system. But this is outrageous. I deal with them all the time in IT and I’ve never had problems with other divisions of Microsoft. I am going to write a scathing letter to Microsoft but I’m sure it won’t make a difference. I just can’t believe how bad they f*cked up as a company with the 360. Games are a great part of the equation but this system has been flawed from the beginning. It’s a good thing they have a lot of money because if this happened to Nintendo or Sony it might have been catastrophic to their future in the video game industry.
