XBox 360 News, views and reviews

Find your XBox 360 crashing after 20 minutes?
I've heard a few reports of this so I thought I'd look into it. Apparently it isn't the new XBox 360 that's overheating, it's a batch of dodgy PSU's. I've read of a few ways to overcome this, ranging from suspending it in the air with rope, to the daftest one - putting the red hot block on a cardboard box and hoping it won't catch fire. Personally I'd rest it on a upturned colandar, but that's not the point. If it's faulty, take it back - availability issues aside.

I find this a bit shoddy myself, but if you you to the Microsoft XBOX 360 support page it helpfully directs you to this entry:

Xbox: The Xbox console freezes and you receive no error message

However, this was last reviewed on October 25, 2005, is specific to the first generation XBox and makes no mention of power supply problems.

Apparently there were problems with the first XBox's PSU overheating too. It seems one family even sued them after it caused their house to burn down! Haven't got an XBox to compare myself, but you'd think that if that was the case Microsoft would be rather more careful second time around, eh.

Anyway - and I'm not having a go at them - my feeling is that in offering a world wide release the sheer volume of units involved means that at times quality control will have been lax. I've worked in manufacturing, I know only too well of managers habit of passing suspect stock to meet quotas. You can get your last dollar that somewhere a Microsoft executive it chewing out a supplier…

All this doesn't help you, eh. As my friend is fond of saying,   'it happens, deal with it!. Basically if you have a dodgy one, take it back to the shop. If you bought it online, either send it back or, preferably, get an RMA from Microsoft and get them to replace it, more likely to get it sorted properly that way.