Entries Tagged 'Microsoft' ↓

The Orange Box has been out for six days now - and I still don’t have a copy.  Part of the problem I can’t decide what to buy it for.  Should I go with PC or Xbox 360?  At the moment I’m leaning toward the 360 since my computer hasn’t been upgraded in a little while.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s still more then powerful enough to play the games just not with the graphics pushed all the way up.  However, I’ve just learned that there are lag issues when playing Team Fortress 2 over Xbox Live, a title patch is reportedly on the way though.

I need to get on the ball and make a decision.  Of course once I do I then need to tear myself away from Halo 3 in order to play.

Microsoft has finally broken down and extended the Xbox 360’s warranty (yet again).  Peter Moore has posted an open letter on Xbox.com (which basically amounts to acknowledgment of the design flaws) explaining that the warranty was extended to deal with the ‘red ring of death issue’.

Now, if only they would issue a statement lowering the price of the 120 gig hdd.

Via Xbox.com :: Xbox 360 Fanboy

Well, it seems TheSpecialist has come to the communities aid!  He has released a new version of his Xbox hard drive hacking program with support for the 120gig security sector.  In order to use it, at the moment, you need to use a Western Digital Scorpio BEVS-LAT laptop hard drive - which I believe is model number WD1200BEVS (can anyone verify this?).  That is the only drive supported by the software at the moment.  Hopefully, the software see new revisions that will supports other drives in the future.

Via Joystiq::Xbox-Scene

It appears that the 120 Gig hard drive and the Elite are out in the wild. Yesterday Xbox-Scene linked to Llama.com’s tare down of the Elite. The llama’s were nice enough to gut the hard drive shell and reveal that it contained a Fujitsu MHW2120BH laptop hard drive. A quick Google search shows us that those drives are running around $100. That’s a bit cheaper then $179. Microsoft has defended their price by comparing the HDD add-on to self-powered external drives - I’m having trouble swallowing that.

Looking at a tare down AnandTech did of the original 20 Gig drive you can see the simple cable that connects the HDD (a common laptop hard drive) to the 360. Microsoft was kind enough to post the instructions for the HDD’s on their site. Looking closely we can see that the first step of installing or removing the drive is to shut down the console. Think about it this way - imagine your installing a hard drive in your laptop - you’d shut it down first - if you were using a self-powered external drive it would be at least USB so you could just plug it in. Now pretend that you ran a SATA cable out of your case and glued it to the top so you could simply plug in a drive. Starting to see the picture?

What Microsoft has created is simply a proprietary SATA to 360 connector, which is housed in a plastic shell with the hard drive. They then tried to convinced everyone that it’s the equivalent of an actual external hard drive. Which it’s not.

Maybe the extra cost is coming from the “transfer cable”…

Holding back free downloads on Live? Over priced song packs? Over charging for accessories? I’m starting to hate the way this is going…