Last night the evening of fun that I planned on my new Xbox 360 didn’t quite go the way that I had hoped, because I had major problems getting my Xbox360 online, and the support offered by Microsoft was shockingly poor.

The first problem that I had was transferring my old Xbox Gamertag. I had to call Microsoft’s support lines to get help, but they were constantly engaged. I did manage to get through twice only to be told by the person the other end that all agents were busy. My number was taken both times and I was told that they would call me back - 30 hours later I’m still waiting for a call……

Eventually, after 2 hours of trying, I did manage to get through to someone who could help and they sorted out my Gamertag for me.

My next problem involved connecting to Xbox Live. My Xbox360 connected straight away, so I thought that everything was ok. However, everytime I tried to enter a game room I kept losing my connection or being told that there was an error. After spending 15 minutes searching Microsoft’s poorly laid out support pages, I eventually worked out my problem was because of NAT.

Apparently there are 3 classes of NAT - Open, Moderate and Strict, and routers that use Strict NAT will have problems connecting to other users also with strict or moderate NAT. Given that I couldn’t join any rooms I think that this is probably most users, and even if I did manage to connect they might not be able to hear me or be heard by me. The Table below gives a summary:

The Microsoft site provided no possible fixes for this problem which was annoying, so I had to trawl the web for a solution. Eventually I found the solution, which involved configuring some ports (UDP 88, UDP 3074, and TCP 3074) on my router. But, it was really annoying that Microsoft didn’t provide the information directly.

As to the Xbox360 itself, what did I think about it once I got going? I love it! It met all of my expectations and exceeded some. Project Gotham Racing is absolutely amazing and I can tell already that I will be spending a lot of time playing it. It has all of my favourite cars, but I was a bit disappointed as both a Porsche lover and previous owner that no Porsches were available.

Perfect Dark Zero was very disappointing and I stopped playing it after 10 minutes, and I doubt if I will give it another crack. IT IS NOT Halo, and I think that is going to be its downfall. If Microsoft hadn’t put it on such a pedestal maybe my expectations as its main launch title, and those of other people I’ve spoken to who feel the same, wouldn’t have been so high.

The Xbox360 has amazing build quality, and the experience of using the dashboard, the wireless controllers and even the new remote just gives it that extra edge.

I have a few negatives that surprised me. The Xbox360 is unbelievably noisy. This is ok when you are in games as obviously the speakers are turned up, but when I’m using the dashboard I find it quite annoying.

The Xbox360 is also very slow loading data from the disk. This really surprised me as I just expected a modern console to be ultra-fast, but I guess it has to do so much loading because games aren’t designed to take advantage of any caching that the hard drive can offer, because they are not standard on the system. I know that this is really going to annoy me next year when big games come out that will be spread across multiple disks, so that disk-swapping will become an additional hassle.

I should be online again tonight so add me ‘Toomuchi’ to you Xbox360 friends list.

Subscribe To RSS Feed Updates (What is RSS??)

Bookmark & Share

Related Posts

• Xbox Live To Support Instant Messaging
• Xbox360 Will Never Support DivX According to Major Nelson
• Microsoft Says Xbox 1 Graphics Are Better Than A Wii
• Xbox 360 Launch Titles - Project Gotham Racing 3 May Not Be Launched In 2005
• Vonage Customer Service Is Awful
• Xbox Live Passes 2M Members
• One For The Mac Lovers: iTunes and iPhoto Support on the Xbox 360