Report Claims 360 Failure Rate Is 16%
The figure is about four times higher than Microsoft's most recent admission.
by
Ryan Geddes
February 14, 2008 - A new report by warranty company SquareTrade indicates that the Xbox 360 has a failure rate of about 16.4 percent under normal usage conditions, a number lower by about half than some retailers have claimed but about four times higher than estimates Microsoft made last year.
By comparison, SquareTrade said on its
buyers' blog today, Sony's PlayStation has a 3 percent failure rate.
Of all the Xbox 360-related service calls SquareTrade has received, 60 percent were general hardware failures, known affectionately as the Three Red Lights or Red Ring of Death by a weeping, bitter population of gamers who have become all too familiar with their local UPS representative.
The remaining 40 percent of warranty claimants had disk read errors (about 20 percent), damaged video cards, hardware freezes, on/off failures and disk tray malfunctions.
SquareTrade said it was unlikely any of the warranty calls it received were for updated Xbox 360s, which Microsoft introduced with an extra heatsink in June to address overheating problems.
Microsoft had not returned our request for comment by publication time.
) I'll have to get a new one and swap the hard drives out so I don't lose all my saved stuff.
