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Xbox360 Purchase: Extended Warranty?
ui
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hello.
I'm ready to jump in...but with how much of an investment?
Is the Xbox 360 hardware safe yet, or, does the new 1 year warranty work alright for most people?
I realize that getting a 2 year extended warranty is ideal, but, do I need it? $70 is huge right now.
Thanks for the help.
I'm ready to jump in...but with how much of an investment?
Is the Xbox 360 hardware safe yet, or, does the new 1 year warranty work alright for most people?
I realize that getting a 2 year extended warranty is ideal, but, do I need it? $70 is huge right now.
Thanks for the help.
ui on
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Posts
If $70 is huge right now, you might as well wait, as the games all cost $60.
Really, if you don't have a lot of money, get old systems, because all the games are cheap now. There are still at least a dozen PS2 games that I want to get to before I go and buy a 360.
I already have a PS2, and I'm planning on using GameFly to offset the rather expensive game charges. At this point, I'm more interesting in knowing how bad the failure rate currently is...
But if $70 is huge for you right now, what are you doing buying a $400 console?
I'M A TWITTER SHITTER
Is it one year extended? Or two year?
If two year, where did you get it?
I should clarify that $70 is mostly huge from a moral perspective...I don't want the warranty to be the equivalent of throwing $70 out the window.
But, if the problems were mostly restricted to the launch units, it seems that the $70 may be not be necessary.
It's two years, which I got just before they announced the extra year, so I'm covered for 3.
I got it straight from Microsoft, it was advertised in the box the 360 came in, on a card.
Hmm, thanks for the tip.
Can you extend your warranty at any time, or, is it restricted to a certain time period after you buy the console?
When I bought the 360 it was still with the 90 day warranty, and the card said I had to purchase the extended warranty before those 90 days were up. I don't know what has changed now since it comes with a year warranty.
I got my two year warranty for $50 and the one year warranty is about $25 (if I remember correctly). I got my warranty on the phone directly from Microsoft (1-800-4-MY-XBOX) after my second 360 broke. I believe you need to do this within 30-90 days of buying your console.
These warranties go on top of the one year warranty that comes with the console. So if you buy a one year warranty, your console will be insured for two years; if you buy a two year warranty, your console will be insured for three years.
I would strongly recommend the warranty, but definitely put it off until the end of the basic one-year warranty period. Waiting until the end gives them an extra year to use your money and you don't get any material benefit from buying the extended warranty early. (Well, maybe one kind of benefit: if you buy it now you won't forget to buy it later.)
I don't know anything really about reliability but I can share my story. My 360 was a premium pack I put on layaway in February and took home in March, so it might be of the same hardware revision as a launch unit. My 360 was fine for months of constant play, and I left my 360 powered on 24x7. I would always have some weird behavior here or there, get a few intermittent lockups, but I figured that was normal.
Then around November I started having problems much more frequently. I called Xbox support with a few symptoms:
1) I downloaded the Tony Hawk Project 8 demo, and occasionally when I would start that demo the demo would display an error and quit. The demo would show the introductory animations without any problem, but then when it was time to start rendering in 3D for some interactive gameplay, occasionally when it would first enter interactive gameplay a system error blade would pop out from the right saying the disk was unreadable and that I should clean the disk. This is a downloaded demo running from the hard disk -- no I will not open up my hard disk and clean the platters. :-)
2) When I play DOA4 with the hard disk installed and let it sit idle playing its attract animations, the system will lock up hard after a few hours. When I play DOA4 with the hard disk removed and let it sit, it will play that animation for days without locking up.
3) Other games have started locking up more frequently with no recognizable pattern.
The answertron 2000 I spoke with concluded my hard disk was bad, so I need to send in my hard disk. Yes that means I lose all my saved games. No they won't send me a temporary memory unit -- if I want my saved games I will need to buy a memory unit.
Only AFTER I have bought this $40 (I think) memory card did I learn that neither of my DOA game saves will copy. The 360 refuses to copy that data.
So I have my ticket number but I just sit on the problem and keep playing. I download the Crackdown demo, and that's completely unplayable. Textures are missing, the sound starts skipping or goes silent altogether. Also when the 360 has been spinning the disk at full speed, like when playing a game, about half the time when it lets the disk spin down again it makes a weird something-is-loose vibrating noise. Also mysterious scratches have started appearing on my disks.
The last straw was when I bought Crackdown at retail and tried to play it with no hard disk -- the game would lock up within usually five, no longer than ten minutes of gameplay. It became a kind of game to see how far I could get before either I chickened out and respawned to force a save or until the game locked up. After literally fifteen to twenty attempts to play the game, with lockups every time, I called Microsoft and they agreed the Xbox itself was defective. They asked me to send in just the 360, not the hard disk, though.
When I got the 360 back, it was obvious that much of the insides had been swapped out. My system serial number was the same, but many other things were different. The DVD tray makes a different noise than it did before, and seems to move a bit faster and open and close with authority now. All of my downloaded TV shows and movie trailers no longer said they had a license when I viewed their list entry, but the first time I tried to play each one the 360 just downloaded a new license. No problem there. All of my paid-for XBLA games retained their license and worked perfectly, even when signed in to a different profile. My network settings were gone and had to be reentered.
I am now EXTREMELY satisfied with my 360. It works flawlessly now and hasn't locked up even once since it's been back. I'm still using the same old hard disk, too -- apparently the hard disk has been fine all along. The repair happened in February, so I'm pretty sure I've received the latest hardware revisions of everything Microsoft knows is likely to fail. I will probably never have another problem with it.
But you better believe I'm going to cough up $50 for another two years of warranty. Being 360-less for 8 days was bad enough. :-)
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Target covers the 360 for $30 for three years.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cykstfc