The lord of the (three red) rings

Last year I purchased XBOX and am very happy about the purchase and the kind of entertainment it afforded me and my son. Suddenly two days back, the XBOX started freezing and then it showed the now (in)famous three red rings indicating a hardware failure. So far it seems that Microsoft has received so many (unacceptable, they say) complaints regarding this that Microsoft has enhanced the warranty coverage for this specific problem for three years and will be refunding all the money you might have paid for the repair. That's good.

One of my friends was at my home when my XBOX 360 died the first time. And his first response was, "Oh, Microsoft, then it is expected. You can't trust these guys for any thing". And it was the same reaction from one of my colleagues in office. That's not good. It's not that I am a fan of Microsoft of anything, but truth be told (again), I make my living off Microsoft.

Later today when I tried to call Microsoft to get the XBOX repaired based on the information that "Max" (Automated Attendant of Microsoft Voice Recognition agent) told me, it took me full of 25 minutes to get through an agent to get a reference number and setup my repair. That's definitely not good. But once I got through to the support rep. he was very helpful and Microsoft is shipping a box to me with a prepaid shipping label and I have to just send the box. Which is somewhat good as customer server has always been Microsoft's stronger suit.

But the other bad part is that I will be without my XBOX for more than one and a half to two months and my son is going to feel the biggest hit of this as I use it not only as a gaming console, but mainly as a streaming server for the content stored on my PC to be displayed on my TV.

So overall my rating comes down to "somewhat bad".