I don't understand how people have so many issues with their consoles. Even my atari still works.
Do you all throw it around or what? I've never had a system that has died on me and I play games daily.
That your atari still works has nothing to do with the Xbox 360's failure rate.
No one's throwing their Xbox's around. The things are just poorly designed.
I have an X-Box and an X360. Neither have failed me and both were purchased when the consoles were first released and played half to death.
Also, thank you for the 'lesson' about an atari having nothing to do with a 360's failure rate, even though I was making a comment about consoles in GENERAL, seeing as to how a number of people had complaints about other consoles in this thread, and taking the 'throwing around' part seriously, as if everyone literally does it.
There's a huge difference between an Atari 2600 and the consoles today: The amount of heat generated and the presence of moving parts. The 2600, the NES, the Super NES, the Sega Genesis ... outside of dirt and grime, those machines still, by and large, work pretty darned well today, and it's because they're all made with solid-state components that generate very little heat (because, really, you don't need a whole lot in terms of power to get an NES running at full speed).
The original Xbox had a failure rate of around 11 percent (much of that due to the choice of using Thomson as the initial DVD-ROM drive manufacturer; the drives often had faulty lasers), the original design of the PS2 had a failure rate around 14 percent (the dreaded Disc Read Error), the SCPH-1001 (launch model) design of the first PlayStation had a failure rate of around 19 percent after three years (heat issues). It happens, simply because of poor industrial design.
In the Xbox 360's case, it's a matter of some of the worst industrial design in the history of console manufacturing, with far too much heat being generated by components in far too little and restricted space with few accommodations for dissipating said heat. The heat causes the GPU to become de-soldered from the board, causing the Red Rings of Death error. The E74 error is also caused by heat, as the scaling chip becomes loose, therefore tripping the fault.
Yeah, some people misuse and abuse their systems, don't put them in spaces with enough ventilation, what have you. But that's a small portion of the widespread technical problems with the Xbox 360. My unit, which I purchased in July 2007, has yet to red ring ... but it's starting to show some video corruption issues. I've prepared a coffin to send it off to Microsoft for the day it does finally let go of this mortal coil.
Wow, That has realy made me think about which console Im getting Next week.