Full 360

There's an old workmate of mine, Estela. (Old, in that I haven't worked with her for over a year..)
She would have but one word for the following: Karma.

Estela, if you're reading this, you were correct; It *does* come back to haunt one's self.. *sigh

Where to start.. the beginning I suppose.
Roll on 23rd of March, said I for a great many months. And so it was fitting that, at 11:30pm on the night of the 22nd, I was standing outside of the EB in Elizabeth street, with Lumpy, only mere minutes remaining until I had the Xbox 360 in my hot little hands.


Despite a somewhat lacklustre turnout..

..and Lumpy getting a ticket number ahead of me..


..they finally started to emerge from the store:


victorious. If not more than a little tired.


And then home, with my vewwy speshil Quake4 faceplate..


..and the largest amount of GREEN packaging I've ever seen in my life:


..and a power adaptor seeking to rival Stonehenge in mass (coke can for reference):


..to be set up:

..plugged in:


..and working!



Wirelessly!


That is, until it connected to Xbox Live for the first time to download a system update, moments later:


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, as it happens, it just must've been a small glitch, because (also, moments) later, it retried and proceeded with it's update.
Yikes. (And an omen of things to come..)

At this point I'm tempted to go into the NIGHTMARES I've had with my wireless router woes, but I wont bore you. Instead, I will say this: DO NOT PURCHASE ANYTHING D-LINK.
No, really. Just don't.
Even their tech support are.. well.. clueless. I called them numerous times citing difficulties connecting to Xbox Live, and they came back at me with all manner of NAT, DNS, DMZ, (and other acronyms) responses ONLY for ME to discover a dedicated page in the configuration menu named 'Xbox Live Compatibility: Enable/Disable'..

..you'd think that the tech support staff would know the option's there. *blink blink

However, even enabling this did not allow for the Xbox360 to communicate to the Live servers. Long story short, I now have a Linksys Wireless Router which is working fine (so far as allowing the Xbox360 to connect to it's servers is concerned..) and I highly recommend it if you have the same troubles.

But, sadly, it all started going downhill from there..

Connection Dropping
Despite working fine and staying connected to Xbox Live, for most of the first night, I started to experience random disconnections. I kept getting 'You have been disconnected from Xbox Live' messages popping up all the time. Sometimes in the middle of a game, sometimes when just idle. And sometimes even in the middle of downloading content.
I thought I had the problem licked when the helpful (omg!) Tech Support staff member at my ISP advised me to enter their DNS addresses into the actual Xbox dashboard, which resulted in the Network Test working properly at last:


Effectively, if this test passes with flying colours (as it now does every time) then it means I have no issues with connecting to Live.
THEN WHY AM I STILL EXPERIENCING RANDOM DROPOUTS ALL THE TIME, MICROSOFT????
And my computers are connected to the Net via the same router, and they are not dropping.

Hardware Lockups
Now, I know all about the issues experienced by users in the US with regard to the unit overheating, but one would think that by now these issues would've been ironed out?
Apparently not.
Mine gets incredibly hot, despite giving the power supply (which has it's own fan by the way) a nice and open space all of it's own on my TV stand (see pic above). In fact, too hot to touch. Both the main console and the power supply.
This, I presume, is the reason the thing locks up after about 3 hours of being on.
Not only that, but yesterday it wouldn't even power up until I left it alone for an hour to cool down. *scary*

Graphic Glitches
THIS, is the most disappointing of all, and possibly an artifact of the overheating.. not sure (as it doesn't occur in all games).
Take a look at some screenshots of Need For Speed Most Wanted:





All nice and pretty, for sure.

So, imagine my surprise when I finally loaded up Project Gotham Racing, only for it to look like THIS:







I mean, this is what my old Video Card in my computer used to do if it got overheated or overclocked..
Try driving with all *that* shit everywhere.
Oddly though, I loaded up Call Of Duty 2 right after those shots, and it worked without a problem. (Despite being continually disconnected from Live GRRRR)

Ahh well, I guess a phonecall to Xbox Support is on the cards for today, but I'm thinking that I got one of the .01% of faulty Xboxen. Just my luck.

No surprises there huh, Estela?