Reasons Why I hate Microsoft

There are many, but the one that is currently bugging me the most is their Xbox customer support (or lack thereof).

The story goes like this, Delta and I enjoy the SSX snowboarding series of games. We already have tricky & 3. We were in the Warehouse and spotted SSX on tour, so we bought it. Got it home and put it in the Xbox, doesn't work. "Your Xbox cannot recognise this disc....." If you've got an Xbox I'm sure you've seen this screen at least once. Now I know my Xbox is old and can be fussy sometimes so I play around for a bit to try and make it work, doesn't go. So I take the game back to the Warehouse, hoping to get an exchange or a refund. The girl on the counter takes a look at the disc, says it doesn't look damaged and rings somebody, who tells her that I need to ring Xbox and explain the problem to them. After she writes down the number for me I come home and ring them, and this is where it gets interesting.

Bearing in mind that I've already been a good customer and registered my Xbox as instructed to do (actually, I wasn't going to register it but I had a faulty DVD remote and I HAD to register it before I could return it and get an exchange) it appears that there is no record of my Xbox on the system (not that he said that but he asked all the questions anyway) and so we have to go through the whole, name address, phone number etc.

"Dunedin, what region is that? It's near Auckland right?"
At this point I want to throw the phone (& the Xbox) out the window.
"No, opposite end of the country." I can tell that this is going to go REALLY well.
I tell him that Dunedin is one of the 5 major cities in New Zealand.
"Yes that's the city but what is the region, Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Canterbury?"
I should've said Canterbury it's close enough after all.
"Otago." He asked me the spelling "O-T-A-G-O"
"W-A-I-K-A-T-O" He replies
"Waikato?? No Otago, O-T-A-G-O"

After putting me on hold a couple of times he gives up and then just when I thought we might get somewhere, his computer crashed!! I resisted the urge to say it must be running Windows XP, undoubtably it would've been running some iteration of Windows, this is after all a Microsoft helpdesk.

When his computer comes back online he asks for the serial number of the Xbox, yet again! Fortunately the data had been saved and is all there.

After several diagnostic tests (clean the DVD, put it in, take it out etc, stuff I'd done already several times) he informs me that the problem is with the Xbox console.

"You'll have to send your Xbox to Xbox customer care in Auckland to be serviced."
"How much will that cost me?"
"Well, unfortunately your Xbox is out of warranty so it'll be $195"
"$195??" I felt like smacking somebody by this point. "You realise I can get a brand new one for $250??"
"The pricing is out of our hands, it is set by Microsoft themselves"
"Well, there not getting any more money out of me, especially not that much. I could probably fix it myself for less than the"
"You probably could"
"Right well I've got a diploma in electronics so I'll have a look on the net to see if I can find some instructions on how to repair it and have a go myself"


Who are they trying to kid??? $195 to fix an Xbox that is, um.... I think nearly 5 years old. I got it the night (yes night, I had to go into Central Park in the middle of the night and pick it up) they were released in NZ.

I'm still fuming about it. I now have a brand new game that I can't play & I can't get my money back for!!!!!!


And to top it all off, the new Xbox 360's (still to be released in NZ as far as I know) use power PC chips instead of Intel ones, (ie it's a Mac in a box, instead of a PC) so they have to use emulation in order to run games from the original Xbox. For this functionality you have to buy the 360 with the Hard Drive (which is around $200 more) and then you have to download the emulation software, and only a certain list of games will work with the emulator. I had a look on the list and 1 game that I have will work with the emulator. 1!! I can't believe that either!! So now I have an old Xbox that won't play my games (it's getting worse, some of my other games have started giving grief as well) and if I were to shell out for a 360 (if they ever come out) that won't play my games either!!!!!

Where'd that go??

Okay that was weird. I went to publish my last post and blogger goes can't find the blog you have specified and so it all disappeared!!

Fortunately I had the text in the clipboard and was able to paste it back in and fix up all the links

Merry Christmas to all...

... and to all a good night!!

How are we all today?? Recovered from too much eating yesterday?? I think I have (although I've only just crawled out of bed)

RoadRunner has been busy scouring the web and come up with this, which is very cool. It's based around badgerbadgerbadger in case you can't work it out. We were considering making something similar at work but ran out of time. It's nice to see that they've plugged some of the true meaning of Christmas in there.

What else??

Watched the pilot movie from the SG1 series last night, now everything makes more sense than it did before.

Went to the midnight carols service at First Church on Christmas eve.
Went driving with Delta around town to see all of the Christmas Lights
Went to the Christmas eve service at Caversham at 7:30 and got to play with lots of cool new toys.

And that's about all, it's been raining rather heavy here since about Wednesday last week and so I haven't been able to do anything I've got to do outside, so I've been sitting watching DVD's most of the time

And then there was web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with being creator of the web, has started his own blog.


I'm sure that this blogging thing is contagious. Ariskah seams to think so.

Jingle Bell Time

Merry Christmas to all!! It's nearly here (only 2 more days to go!)

I've changed the template that blogger uses for my blog, I was getting sick of the black so I've gone for one called this-a-way -blue. Let me know what you think.

Yesterday was our works do, and the last day of work for the year. YAY! Last year they got a bus for us, which I got talked into going on, a mistake I was not going to repeat this year. When they came and asked us recently who would be interested in going on a bus, a whole bunch of people said no and so they canned that idea this year and we all went in cars. When we left work, Mustafa and I went down Union St and turned into Anzac Ave, while everyone else went via Albany St (and had to give way to us at the end haha). However, our cunning plan didn't work as when we got to the level crossing we had to wait on a train and so they all caught up with us, all except RoadRunner, he and Monkey decided they would go over the bridge and as such didn't have to wait with the rest of us. While we were stopped there, MM who decided she didn't want to wait drove around Dook and pulled up beside us. I asked her if she wanted to race and revved the engine (see having a noisy exhaust does have some uses afterall). KB was sitting in the back of her car and took a photo of me leaning out the window. Once the train passed we all headed off down to Glenfaloch and had a wonderful time, I think it's probably the best Christmas do I've ever been on since I started working there, and I nearly wasn't going to go after the shambles last year's one was.




My face and ears are starting to peal after I got sunburnt last weekend. Fortunately my arms aren't, they've just tanned up nicely.

Anyway, not much else to report. Am waiting on Delta to get home and I'm supposed to be going to see the Caretaker to get a new key for the church, they've changed one of the locks (one that I need to be able to open) and nobody bothered to tell me.

Well that was fun....

... After 3 days the Railway engineer and his Wife are finally moved into there new home

... Wanted to watch King Kong after Mrs Incredible suggested we go watch a movie, but there wasn't a showing that suited us, so we didn't go. Mr Incredible wants to go see the Worlds Fastest Indian tomorrow night, but there was a reason I didn't want to see it. Which currently eludes me.

... Took Dook's trailer back to him after a quick trip to the dump. Had a load of recycling stuff on it but I dumped half of it because I couldn't find the right bins because they're not signposted. The transfer station is much better.

... Took Ariskah's car down to get new brakes put in the back. That was fun, well sort of. Stops well now (I mean REALLY well) so that's the main thing. I can see now why some people don't like European cars, they drive well but have you ever tried to work on one?
Speaking of driving well, I finally got to compare the commodore to Ariskah's car today, although it wasn't really a fair test because the commodore had a trailer on it. Ariskah's car has a lot more get-up-and-go then the commodore, but the commodore has LOTS and LOTS of torque. The commodore will struggle up a hill (better than the mazda struggles up the same hill I might add) when it is empty. But when you load it down (and I mean really load it down, full of furniture and with a full trailer on behind) it will still go up the same hill at the same speed as when it was empty. Go figure. The commodore also has power to burn, not power for speed, it's not really designed for that, but power to pull anything you like. We tried pulling a ute out of the Railway Engineer's garage with the commodore and had it half out on the street before we realised the brakes had seized and the front wheels weren't turning. The commodore still pulled it though, even Delta (who's a Ford fan by the way) was impressed. When we finally got the ute rolling you could hardly even notice it was on behind the commodore. I could have pulled it MUCH faster, but because one of the wheels was on back-to-front and the other one had already shared off when we were pulling it out the garage I went slow (and made the Railway Engineer follow behind in case anything went wrong)

... I've driven 5 cars in the last 2 days. My 2, the Railway Engineer's 2 and Ariskah's.

Silly little Japanese car

All the petrol heads bag European cars. I'm sure that many of them have never driven a so called "Euro-trash" car. I was one of them, I stand corrected. After driving around with Ariskah over the last week or so and driving the car this evening I much prefer it to the "Silly little Japanese car" that I "normally" drive. It would be interesting to take Ariskah's car for a spin and then take the commodore out straight away afterward, since I prefer driving that over the mazda too. I think what the Mazda needs is a great BIG turbo bolted on the front, that might fix it. Might not too cos the turbo will only fix things like performance but won't fix things like uncomfortable seats. Well they're not that uncomfortable, but compared to the commodore (or even Ariskah's car for that matter) they are.

Dodgy Capacitors

Road Runner has an interesting post on his site about dodgy caps. However, his server that hosts his domain is affected by said capacitors and currently offline awaiting repairs so I can't link to his post so I'll just sit here and do something else (I know maybe I'll read some more register) and wait for him to fix the hardware before we go and ghost it.

Space Marines

Road Runner, who says I spend too much time reading The Register, (and he might be right, while I'm waiting for Blogger to load (they having a go-slow this morning) I have 21 tabs open in Camino, 1 is his blog, 1 is Blogger (funnily enough) and the rest are all register articles waiting to be read) has just been tramping. There are some cool photo's, especially this one of his car fully loaded down. He say's it never scraped but it can't have missed by much, mind you, he's got factory wheels on it so it shouldn't have been a problem. (Not like mine, which is similar except a 2 door white 4WD, when it had the mags on it, see previous posts for details)


Last night Delta organised a game of Laser Force. They were short on numbers so Ariskah and I went along to fill up a couple of extra spots. It was good fun! (especially since Ariskah and I top-scored in the pairs game, and she's never played before) One of Delta's friends was working there and she managed to get us a free membership deal (don't know what it normally costs) so now I have a Laser Force Membership Card with ToothpickBandit written (rather scruffily, I might add) on the front. After we finished at Laser Force we went to A&E's place for a BBQ. Ariskah sat in the back of the car and said that it's not as loud as when I first got it (which is good) and is no longer unbearable. It's still louder than factory but it sounds alright so I think I'll leave it at that. At some stage I've got to build some speaker bins to go in the back so I might put some more packing in to quieten it down a bit more.


This morning, I got to work and there are more big trucks (with little trucks on the back) here. They appear to be getting very close to being ready to move houses!! I have a photo, and as soon as I can find somewhere to host it I'll post it.


Also this morning, when I was reading over ThinkGeek's christmas "suggestion" list, I found this. All I can say is I WANT ONE!! (shame they are so expensive though)


I've just worked out that the go-slow may not be in Blogger, but in my Mac itself. :-( Maybe it's getting a bit upset that it's hard drive is getting fuller and fuller by the day. I really need to get my 200Gb external drive sorted out and reformatted OSX extended so I can make better use of it.