Dear Microsoft,

Take NXE and stick it up your collective backside, sideways. Stop pimping this to me, I'm really not
interested. The Dashboard works fine; it's your hardware that sucks.

Its not that I don't appreciate your efforts to make my console more accessible to everyone. Its not that I
have been unhappy with my Xbox 360 experience overall. Its not even the fact that you have THE worst
customer service I've ever experienced. I just want my 360 to work for more than 12 months.

360 #1 died giving disk-read errors almost a year ago to the day. It worked beautifully until the week after
PGR4 came out, then it decided that none of my games were actually 360 titles. Irritating, but I knew what I
was getting into with this machine and had kind of expected it. The retailer I bought it from were most
accommodating and replaced it with a newer HDMI-equipped model. Merrily I skipped home to continue
playing PGR4 and Halo 3.

360 #2 has been in a slow decline for over a month. Disk-read errors again, ramping-up in frequency and
severity over the last few weeks, finally becoming fatal at 0330 this morning whilst playing Fallout 3.

So I called you this morning to see how much this will cost me.

Yes, I have checked that my disks are clean and unscratched (all fifty or so of them). The game that saw the
final error came out of it's sealed case yesterday morning and went straight into the drive - brand-new and
unmarked. My Xbox lives in what is practically a clean-room environment (no smoking, no cat - this room is
also my home studio), with plenty of space around it for airflow. The light on the power-supply is green, the
console boots fine, I'm connected to Live, my Arcade titles work, I can stream music and video to the
machine - the 360 works, apart from the drive. It doesn't even get that hot during playing, especially not
compared to my Wii and PS3; it's been a model citizen until this. HOW MUCH? I can nearly buy a new
Arcade system for that! To put this error in some context for you, my PS1, PS2, XboxHUEG, Saturn and
Dreamcasts all still work perfectly. PERFECTLY. I have an 8 year-old iMac that still has a functioning DVD
drive, and a 10 year-old Technics CD player that works like the day it was bought. Why the hell am I facing
another new 360 or a repair bill?

Treating me like a child after I have waited thirty minutes to speak to somebody when I call you does NOT
endear you to me, pro-tip there. I KNOW how to connect my system up to my home theatre. I realise that
you have a script to stick to 'Michael', but when I have gone through all of your troubleshooting steps TWICE
and the machine still does not work as expected, DO NOT SAY "maybe we should try this again in case we
missed something". I wish to murder you 'Michael', slowly and horribly. To then put me on hold for ten
minutes and come back asking for £80 to fix it WILL send me into a rage - this is NOT my fault, this machine
is less than a year old and this is the SECOND time this has happened to me in a year. Disk-read errors are
the second most common reason for Xbox 360 failures after the three red lights as far as I can tell, so yes,
there is a problem with your hardware and it's design. YOU fix it at no cost to me.

Part of the reason I'm so annoyed by this is that I'm meant to be having a Rock Band party tonight. No 360
no Rock Band, obviously. So my partner has gone out scouting for the best deal on a new 360. We can use
the borked one in the lounge as a media extender, so its not totally useless (and who knows, it may red-ring
resulting in a refurb anyway). Its just the bloody inconvenience of it all and MS' useless phone-line that have
got to me. Well, that and losing my progress in Fallout 3 when the stupid thing hard-locked.

NXE looks nice really, though its not really for me. I just wish the hardware was up to scratch. You market
this as the hardcore gamer's machine, it should stand up to hardcore gaming. Will this new one be any
better? It bloody well better be!