Joey keeps saying over and over again that MS should have idiot proofed the thing... which suggests that with some exceptions, only idiots will make the X360 fail... which is quite clearly not the case unless he is prepared to call most everyone here who have had serious problems with their X360 an idot, as well as those on other gaming sites, and every one of the million or so users who have also had serious problems with their X360, but apparently are not idiots when it comes to using their Wii and PS3.
As for F@H, its been around for over six years, and while I have never read any official response from Microsoft on why they have yet to allow Stanford to publish a F@H program for the X360, but I suspect it is that they fear that the strain on the system would crash anyone's X360 running F@H. By comparison, there are hundreds of PS3's that have been running F@H for over 2,000 hours straight since March when Stanford and Sony released the F@H software for the PS3. Even GTP's own F@H group have several members who have been running F@H for several weeks with little or no breaks.
Suggesting that this is mostly or even partially because PS3 owners treat their PS3 better than their X360 is rather disjointed, and one would find it impossible to even prove, while it has already been proved by some individuals who own both and treat both equally that they have had serious problems with their X360, while their PS3 is largely trouble free, even when running something like F@H that pushes the systems close to its capabilities.
Frankly, this doesn't bode well for future advanced game development on the X360, because if it fails from basic use, and MS wont even allow it to run F@H, then no matter what it may or may not be capable of doing, if the design can't handle the processor working extra hard, developers will not be able to tap into its potential.
BTW: There was an article written about a month ago, I don't remember who published it, about some owners of failed X360 units that where sent new X360 as replacements, but because of that, they lost all their downloaded content.
Relating to Duck's personal observations of discovering that his X360 was scratching discs, the following
story may be of interest:
On April 14, 2007 the Dutch TV program "Kassa," as a reaction of over a thousand customers complaining about the fact that their Xbox 360 had scratched up their game disks, broadcasted a program in which they revealed a test they had done. The test indicated that some Xbox 360s, equipped with Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology (TSST) DVD players, scratch DVDs spontaneously, even when the Xbox is placed on a stable surface, rendering some games unplayable.
Microsoft attended the Kassa broadcast and provided replacement equipment to the user. Additionally, the Microsoft representative informed Kassa that Microsoft had contacted the 1% of users who reported the problem with the offer of replacing all their game discs and consoles.
In the beginning of June 2007 the European Commission started an
investigation into these scratching problems.
.
