My 360 (or more accurately a replacement unit) finally returned from it’s long journey across the country on Friday January 5th. For anyone that’s counting, that’s 24 days after the first phone call. That’s a week and three days longer than support suggested it would take, however, the turnaround time did include both Christmas, and new year’s day. All in all it’s been a fairly painless experience. I did hit a snag with the shipping, however, a friend of mine was able to take it to UPS for me the day after I called MS regarding the shipping issue. It’s a good thing too, because I never did hear back from the auditing department as Mel Gia (a supervisor at the support center I contacted) suggested I would.

I’m still in the process of tying up a few loose ends. My girlfriend no longer has access to any of our downloadable content due to Microsoft’s DRM. For anyone who doesn’t know, when you pay for a piece of downloadable content, say an XBLA game, it is tied to both the gamertag it was downloaded under, and the console it was downloaded on. My girlfriend and I both had access to the content on the old system, but since everything was purchased under my gamertag, she is now locked out of everything. I called the support line, and after ten frustrating minutes of explaining the situation to a woman named Tara who couldn’t hear a word I was saying for some reason, I was transfered to a supervisor named Yonika (spelling?) who made arrangements to credit all of the necessary points to my girlfriend’s XBL account so that the items could be repurchased. It will take five to seven business days to get the points. As far as my Xbox Live downtime, a helpful customer service rep on their forums told me that, unfortunately, they don’t offer compensation for downtime, but he did say that he is periodically given codes for XBL time, and the next time that happens, he’ll pass one on to me.

I went into this experience expecting to go through one of the horror stories I’ve heard about Microsoft’s support. While the experience wasn’t perfect (I was hung up on by a rude Indian woman who was allegedly transferring me) it wasn’t terrible either. Is there room for improvement? Sure. Were all of my problems addressed? Yes. If your 360 breaks, just take a deep breath, and take it one step at a time, and chances are you’ll be ok in the end.

-MIKE KURZ