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Three red lights flash on the Ring of Light and I’m returning an Xbox 360… on Friday the 13th

As I wrote in an earlier post this week, on the coverage (here in PC Magazine) of what to do if three red lights flash on your Xbox 360’s Ring of Light. 


Well, here it is Friday the 13th and I’m returning an Xbox 360 for repair. I thought that it may be helpful to share my experience on how to handle the situations should it happen to you.


What should you do first?


First, online see the brief knowledge base article KB 907534. (Excerpts from the KB follow.) Examine the lights on the power supply. When you turn on the console, the power supply light should illuminate green even if the three lights on the Ring of Light flash red. If the power supply unit light is not green, follow the steps that are listed in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles:



  • 906101 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906101/) Xbox 360: The power supply light is red

  • 906102 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906102/) Xbox 360: The power supply light is orange


  • 906103 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906103/) Xbox 360: The power supply light is not illuminated

Next, turn off the console. Wait 10 seconds, and then again turn on the console to see whether the symptom occurs again.

 

If you continue to experience this behavior, contact Xbox Customer Support…



  • Assistance by phone seven days a week, toll free (US): 1-800-4MY-XBOX


  • International (direct dial to U.S.): 425-635-7180 (a toll call)


  • Hearing Impaired (TDD device): 1-866-740-9269 or 425-635-7102


  • Hours of operation (every day): 9:00 AM to 1:00 AM Eastern, 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM Pacific

When you call, you’ll be routed to “Max” the Xbox online virtual support attendant, who will advise you that there are “long wait times” to get support and offer a chance for you to go through the steps above.

You should be able to say the word “agent” at the prompt that transfers you to an agent.


I listened to hold music for nearly 30 minutes before I was conneted to a live person.


There are a few things to have at the ready when you call: your Xbox 360 serial number, your shipping address and patience. In the end the agent that took my call was courteous, very helpful and walked me through the process in approximately ten minutes. If possible, call on an off hour, such as first thing in the morning or later in the evening to get through a little faster. 


And then have more patience at the ready, as the quoted current repair time is now 4-6 weeks.


Once you get your repair number from the customer service agent, make sure that they have your email address: once you have returned your Xbox 360 (via UPS in the States) you will be able to follow the cycle via the tracking number. And if you provide your email address (remind if you are not prompted for it) you should receive updates via mail.


You’ll then receive a box to return your Xbox 360 for processing and repair. Remember to send only the Xbox 360 base unit, keeping all cables, controllers, power supply (unless the power supply unit light is not green when powered) and external hard drive, unless told to include one of these devices.


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Your questions: “What do you think about the Xbox 360 warranty extension?”

OK, I’m officially on vacation (I’m lousy at that) but the weekend has been ripe with questions since the press coverage and Peter Moore’s letter on Xbox.com.



“What do you think about the Xbox 360 warranty extension?”


If you missed it… see the Wall Street Journal coverage or the coverage on PC Magazine. And if you have seen the three flashing red lights of death, you have no doubt called into customer service to get help with your Xbox 360.


First off, IMHO, this is an example of how the Xbox group focuses on doing the right thing by customers. I have had it happen to one of our systems at home, and had a good experience to get the system exchanged (without noting my employer and pulling the “hey, I’m an employee” card). The announcement last Thursday to take a charge and extend the warranty period to three years (and to refund customers who previously paid for a related warranty repair) was a decision in the interest of the customer, IMHO. (All of this is IMHO, of course.)


Here’s what has been announced, from Peter’s messages: we’re providing a specific warranty coverage extension to three years for any console that displays the three-red-light error message. If you get that, we’ll repair the console, free of charge, including shipping, for three years from the purchase date. And if you already paid Xbox to get your unit fixed outside of the warranty period, Xbox will retroactively reimburse you if you had that problem and had paid to fix your box. There’s a good interview with Xbox’s Peter Moore by N’Gai Croal from Newsweek in which Peter said…



“Business is strong; we’re going to have a good E3, but to cut to the chase, there’s something we haven’t done so well, and that’s that the rate of repairs that have been coming in showing the three-flashing-red-lights error message has been, quite frankly, unacceptable to us. So we’ve decided to take some steps to take care of that.”


That’s a pretty plain approach to the topic.


To me, three years seems like a reasonable extension. I recall the only products I own with longer warranties are much ‘simpler’ products, such as the lifetime warranties on my computer memory and SD cards. My wife’s Dell laptop at home has a four year warranty but I paid for that extension, and the actuaries out there estimate that I’ll replace the computer with a new one before the warranty expires. Our cars have three and four year warranties. But I don’t know of another consumer electronic product with an out-of-the-box warranty longer than a year.


We have a couple of original Xboxes at home — one that the kids use and truly hammer — still running strong (knock on wood). My expectation is that the Xbox 360 should last as long as these old units given we use them for so much more (DVD playback and Media Center Extenders) and probably longer. Our TVs and ReplayTV DVRs are still going strong long after their initial one year warranties, with some units on their sixth year of life. (Disclaimer: the DVRs all have new, larger hard disc drives.) 


If you need help with an Xbox 360 hardware failure in the US, call 1-800-4MY-XBOX for customer support, or dial 425-635-7180. (See http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/contact for more details.)


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IPTV, Media Centre, VOD rumours… oh my

Long Zheng reports in his blog earlier this week that “a trademark application in Australia… looks to be for a video-on-demand service from Microsoft yet to be identified has been made available publically.”


Ars Technica picked up on Zheng’s report noting that “the trademark description also mentions downloadable video content, as well as the ability to transmit photos, video, and music over their broadband connections.”


Sounds familiar. 😉


Ars also picks up on Zheng’s reference to Joost, in that “Media Center already has the ability to record shows, view pictures, and listen to music, so adding on-demand TV or movie programming would be a natural extension of the software’s abilities. A Joost-like service could also be incorporated into the Xbox’s video offerings, rounding out the console as a full-on media center.”


Perhaps a new chapter in Xbox Live video services? Sounds interesting.


[Added later… Fortune reports “Joost just received $45 million in funding in a recent round of venture capital funding. In another sign that Joost is becoming the go-to web video site for the media establishment, the site just inked a deal with the big-time talent and literary agency CAA.”]

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Mary Jo Foley: Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft

Last week, ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley posted on her blog the Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft.


“When it comes to building community — and profiting from it — Microsoft’s Xbox team is helping write the playbook. That fact isn’t lost on the rest of the company. Increasingly, other divisions at Microsoft are studying what the Xbox folks are doing right and trying to apply those lessons to their own products and services.”


She’s right, IMHO.


Mary Jo spoke with JJ Richards, the GM of Xbox Live, to collect his thoughts on what other parts of the company could learn from the Xbox. Here they are…



1. Tiers need to be clear and simple. In Xbox Live, there is gold and there is silver. Fewer, simpler SKUs are better.


2. The dashboard is the UI. Users want access to lots of data, all in one place. They don’t want to have to hunt for it.


3. An online marketplace sells content. The Windows and Office Live teams already grok this one. Making Microsoft and third-party wares available as a one-stop shop helps move more add-on hardware, software and services.


4. Arcade: Not everyone is a shooter-game pro. Users come with different skill sets and interests. Some prefer “Geometry Wars” to “Gears of War.” Microsoft’s Developer Division gets this, and is launching Express versions of its tools for hobbyists/nonprofessional programmers.


5. Achievements are a way to stay in touch. The more ways you can encourage community members to stay in touch, the better.


6. Ubiquitous voice and text are de rigeur. In the Web 2.0 world, everyone’s a multi-tasker. All services and apps should bake-in messaging, mail and other unified-communications technologies.


7. Roaming accounts are key. Users want their audio and video content, contact lists, address books, favorites and other settings available on any device, anywhere at any time.


8. Build communities within your community. Gamerzones in the Xbox world allow similar types of users to more easily connect. What’s the business equivalent of Xbox Live’s “Underground”? Good question.


9. Points are the new online currency. Office Online already is moving in this direction, and other Microsoft Live services will likely do the same.


10. Gamerscore = reputation. Other divisions at Microsoft have been wrestling with how to rank community participants by “reputation” to help users gauge which content/commentary to trust. Gamerscore could become the model here.


“Richards acknowledged that the Xbox Live team can learn a thing or two from other Microsoft divisions, as well, such as how to handle child safety settings in world with more and more user-generated content. But it seems to me that it’s Microsoft’s non-gaming businesses that have more to learn from the Xbox team — at least when it comes to building community — than the other way around.”


I’ll add number 11: Connect with your customers. Customers want to be heard and sometimes appreciate that they have influenced product design and delivery with their feedback. More and more, teams have formalized how they get direct responses from customers, whether it’s internally through a dogfood deployment, more formally through a Connect-managed beta or customer focus groups to see how people react to and how they use a new product or service. Some of the teams that have the best understanding of their customer’s needs are connecting directly in 1:1 and 1:many discussions, whether it’s on Xbox Live in head-to-head matches and play, or on blogs like the Xbox team’s Gamerscore blog, the Xbox team blog on MSDN and of course Major Nelson.

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Thoughts on the new Apple TV (seeing it live with iTunes) and Xbox 360

Peter Svensson is a technology writer for the Associated Press, and the Seattle Times picked up his article his article comparing the new Apple TV peripheral with the Xbox 360:



“Apple Inc. has graced the public with another smooth, white, exquisitely designed gadget, this time aiming at making it easier to play iTunes movies and songs on the living-room TV set.


“Too bad, then, that where looks really matter – in the quality of the video on the TV screen – the $299 Apple TV comes up very short. It’s as if Apple had launched an iPod that sounded like a cassette player.


“After having my eyes gently caressed by the Apple TV’s menus, the Xbox interface is like a slap in the face. It’s garish and confusing, and you have to press more buttons to get where you want to go.


“But the Xbox does your HDTV justice. Microsoft’s Xbox Live marketplace has some movies in HD, and these look absolutely stunning – better than most broadcast HD, and almost indistinguishable from HD DVD or Blu-ray discs, which provide the best video quality available to consumers right now.”


Balance this with a couple of excerpts from Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret’s review “From PC to TV — via Apple” in the WSJ.



“We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.


“In our tests, Apple TV performed perfectly in Walt’s house over a standard Wi-Fi wireless network with a Pioneer plasma TV and six different computers — three Windows machines from Hewlett-Packard and Dell, and three Apple Macs. Setup was a breeze, the user interface was clean and handsome, and video and audio quality were quite good for anyone but picky audiophiles and videophiles. We never suffered any stuttering, buffering or hesitation while playing audio and video from distant computers.


“There are some drawbacks to Apple TV. It won’t work with most older TV sets, the square kind that aren’t capable of handling widescreen programming. … Also, the tiny, simple Apple remote control can’t control the volume on either Apple TV or your TV set or audio receiver, so you have to keep reaching for the TV or audio receiver remote. And you can’t plug in an extra hard disk to add storage capacity, even though there’s a USB port on the back and the built-in 40-gigabyte drive is too small to hold many TV shows or movies.


“But, all in all, Apple TV is a very well-designed product that easily brings the computer and the TV together.”


As you may know from past blogs entries, we use a Windows Media Center at home. So, I decided to go and have a look for myself at the local Apple Store.


When I asked the smartly dressed staff at the Store about the quality of the AppleTV, he rattled off the basic information and specs I’d read online. I don’t have that much premium iTunes content (nor do I actively use it to manage my music and vide library, as I use a Windows Media Center with Media Center Extenders), so I was less interested in watching movie trailers from Apple.com on my TV.


My interest was managing broadcast TV content that comes in to our Media Center today, and how one would get live TV into a Mac for use with the Apple TV. The employee had an answer, suggested adding the SRP$230 Plextor ConvertX PVR. (It also comes in a a Mac flavour, which includes Elgato EyeTV software to pause and record live video on to your Mac.)


And further, he suggested that I could share that content and view it over my network with my AppleTV and then offered without prompting that “it was more economical than looking at a Media Centre PC or a TiVo.”


Hmmm… not sure about his math: that’s a $530 premium over the cost of a new Apple Macintosh.


What I did notice was the quality on the large HD screen in the store. The trailer content was very rich, but there was not an option to view the regular fare fro iTunes. You’d think that they would have a stable of programmes to view and demo. As echoed in the AP review above, CNET notes in their review of the Apple TV, the “current crop of iTunes movies and TV shows look much worse on a big-screen TV.”



“Unfortunately, the excellent streaming performance is offset by a drawback that’s more the fault of iTunes than Apple TV: generally disappointing video quality. Movies and TV shows in iTunes are currently available in what Apple calls “near-DVD quality”–a maximum of 640×480. Perhaps “bad analog cable quality” would be more descriptive–all of the videos were quite soft, lacking the sort of fine detail we’ve come to expect from well-mastered DVDs.


“To be clear, none of the video quality problems are necessarily the fault of the Apple TV. It’s the movies and TV shows that you’re buying at the iTunes Store that are falling down. Even with the higher resolution (they were formerly optimized for 320×240), iTunes videos are still optimized for the small screen and the storage capacity of the iPod. And they look fine on that 3.5-inch screen, or even a 15-inch laptop screen. But these same videos just can’t scale up to a 50-inch plasma without suffering. Ideally, Apple will someday begin selling files that are optimized for true DVD resolution (720×480) or even true HD resolution (1280×720), and do so with considerably less compression.”


That’s a challenge for DVR recorded TV: most of the content and recorders is in standard definition – there are HD offerings, but we’re still an SD DVR household like the majority of television viewers with a DVR. But there is an expectation when something is DVD-quality, or HD format from the get go: you expect to be able to maximize your investment in a larger TV screen, especially if you purchased into an HD-compatible system.


From what I have seen, here’s what I like, from start to finish: the packaging, documentation, design, set-up (but c’mon, include the basic cables here) and stylish user interface. Overall, this is a user out of box experience (OOBE) that I now anticipate from Apple… and further what I expect from our own Zune team.


Perhaps the Zune team will have some influence on our (with all due respect) Media Center team, and the willingness to further enhance the customer experience with our Media Center Extender, which other manufacturers implement… that doesn’t make for a Zune-like experience (I almost typed Zen-like).


If you’e an iTunes user, the AppleTV appears to be a good match especially if you want to extend iTunes into the living room. As we have a Media Center PC which records and stores our TV and media content, Media Center Extenders (both dedicated, but frankly we use the Xbox 360 more) make more sense.


Xbox Live is good addition to offering movies and TV shows in both SD and HD TV. Perhaps we’ll see more emphasis on similarly priced (or even lower-cost) Media Center Extenders that extend the experience and take advantage not only of the recorded Media Center content, but the Xbox Live Marketplace for movies and tv delivered to the Media Center PC.  And the larger 120GB hard disc offering coming soon for the Xbox 360 (see here for more details) will provide a better basis for archiving and downloading content, especially HD content.


Read the arstechnica review of the Apple TV here


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