I saw this ad this weekend and it made me sad.  For so many reasons…

Here are the stats as they are right now:

• 8 weeks
• 20 phone calls
• 4 promises of callbacks that never happened
• 2 faxes
• 7 hours on the phone
• They hung up on me twice
• I hung up on them twice (kindly)

All for about $33 worth of stuff that Jessie can’t use under her account anymore because Microsoft makes crappy hardware.

For those interested in keeping score at home, I moved my personal notes from Backpack to a page here.

I kinda mentioned a little in my last post that I was attempting get Xbox Live content purchased on my old (broken) Xbox authorized on my new Xbox. I can still use the content under my account but Jessie is unable to use it under her account and we would not be able to use it in offline situations and it seemed reasonable that since our Xbox broke because of Microsoft’s RROD issues that they would be willing to transfer the licenses.

Well, it has been about 6 weeks now and I have spent over 8 hours talking on the phone with Microsoft Support. It is my understanding now that the investigation of my case has completed and the license should be updated in the next two week. Awesome.

If you are interested in the issue, there are a bunch of other people with this problem and 95 (and this point) pages of discussion over on the Xbox.com forums.

There are a bunch of good games for the Xbox 360 (Bioshock comes to mind) but lately I’ve been playing a bunch of Xbox 360 meta-games. Some of them are more fun than others.

Big Money no Rings

Prior to getting the red rings of death you often have a randomly freezing system. This game is played by crossing your fingers every time you turn your system on and hope that it does not freeze and you don’t get red rings. It is a pretty short game. For us it was about 2 days.

Best Buy Inventory Searcher

We had a replacement plan from Best Buy. The game was to find a premium system with HDMI at any Best Buy in Austin. The systems that were not premiums with HDMI were manufactured over a year ago and would be prone to the RROD again. This game is made more difficult by some quality Best Buy employees. “Xbox Premium with HDMI? Oh, you mean the Elite. We have those.” This game took us about 2 weeks and numerous phone calls.

DRM Fighter

The most difficult game I have had to play has to do with Microsoft’s Xbox Live content DRM system. Content is locked to the system you purchase it on (that system is in a big pile at Best Buy) and to the account that purchased it (my account, not Jessie’s). So Jessie is not able to use the content I purchased and we can’t use it when our internet connection or Xbox Live is down. There are multiple mini-games for this game.

Call System Master

Mastering the automated system to shorten the time to get you to talk to someone. “Xbox Live, Xbox 360, Give me the list, None of these”

Lost in Translation

Seems to be in India call center reading a script. See if you can actually talk to someone you can understand.

Pants on Fire

See how many times Microsoft will tell you that someone will call you back or some other story to get you off the phone. And then when they call you back they know nothing about it.

So far I’ve been playing this game for 4.5 hours over the period of 2 weeks. I have talked to 13 different people and only one or two of them have had any clue. I’m gonna keep plugging away until I get access to what I paid for.

For the past few weeks I’ve been considering a Series 3 Tivo (and now the new Tivo HD) but Austin has switched digital and I could not find a list of channels I could not receive without a 2-way cable card.

Here is the list I got from Time Warner today. The list was a lot longer than I expected. Hopefully Google will pick this up and it will help others in the same situation.