xbox 360 extended warranty - anybody had a reply?

[Pirotic]

Hi chaps, i sent off my ?50 (or was it ?60) together with that voucher to extend my xbox360 warranty to two years (3 xbox's died on me during the last 3 years so i figured it would work out cheaper in the long run).

Got it sent off on time (you had to send it off within 10 days or purchasing) but i've not heard anything back and no moneys gone out of the account.

Phoned microsoft support "sorry they dont have a department you can contact, you can try sending a letter to the address you send the payment to but they probably wont answer".

Great :P

Anybody else heard back yet?

[anephric]

Do you even need to do this? I'm sure MS have to honour the EU 2-year consumer goods guarantee? They can't fob you off with the old UK 12-month thing.

http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l32022.htm

[Pirotic]

They, the literature which comes with the 360 says it only has a 3 month warranty :P a bit worrying and i'm not really clued up on the EU/UK law in terms of gaurantee's

[Keith]

I'm absolutely positive that Anephric is right.

But I could be wrong.

But I don't think I am.

[Pirotic]

I read on another forum that everything in europe is covered by the 2 year EU guideline, but then some legal chap came and pissed on the bonfire :P

[anephric]

I'm curious - what did he piss on, exactly? I've hunted through a fair few EU regulation sites and they all state electronic goods are covered in the UK by the EU 2-year guarantee. If it goes faulty in the first two years, the onus is on the provider/retailer/manufacturer.

[MJ]

My Service Contract came in the post today!

It has an American postage mark on it and the covering letter is American too.

The strange thing is I sent it off on 17 Jan, the cheque cleared around 19 April, and the contract says in was purchased on 9 March and is effective from 13 Feb 2007 to 13 Feb 2009.

Anyway, at least I finally have it!

[Strolls]

I'm curious - what did he piss on, exactly? I've hunted through a fair few EU regulation sites and they all state electronic goods are covered in the UK by the EU 2-year guarantee. If it goes faulty in the first two years, the onus is on the provider/retailer/manufacturer.

We had this discussion in a photography forum recently & I did a fair bit of research.

I found it to be the case with SLR cameras that if the shutter fails then it would be debatable whether this legislation covered it, because this could be argued to be normal wear & tear and that the failure does not imply "lack of conformity" with "the description given by the seller" and that it could still "possess the qualities of the product which the seller has held out to the consumer as a sample or model". A digital SLR could be good enough "for the purposes for which goods of the same type are normally used" yet still fail after a particularly high number of shutter activations. However we were on this occasion discussing failures of cameras after about 10,000 - 15,000 frames, which equates to 144 photos a week, and I felt that considering the size of camera memory these days you would have a very strong case in a court of law to say that a camera which had failed after such use had not lived up to reasonable expectations.

This is a wordy way of saying that a car which had suffered an engine failure after 23 months and 300,000 miles might well not be covered by that law.

I was about to say: so it seems to me that there's no way any games console could fail to be covered under this law, and it seems to me that consoles are exactly the kind of consumer device the law is intended to cover; a 2 year warranty better ensures that manufacturers make better quality kit, rather than crap will fall apart 13 months after purchase, "sorry, mate, your warranty ran out".

Apart from the optical drive there's no moving parts in a console which could be covered under the "wear & tear" (I'm summarising) proviso, and any manufacturer that tried to argue that it's normal for an the optical drive to fail within 2 years of purchase would surely get slapped by a court (although they could get around this by stating on the box "please have the optical drive serviced every 17,000 hours use").

Then I realised that the 360 has a hard-drive, and it seems to me to be one item that might not be covered - everyone who has built computers knows that hard-drives wear out unpredictably, that you could buy a batch of 10 hard-drives from a shop and one could die within a month whilst another runs for a decade. Because the tolerances of hard-drives are so fine, it might be impossible for a manufacturer to determine the life expectancy of any given drive (manufacturers quote "mean (average) time between failures" from their own testing of similar drives), and no way to perform Q&A upon them apart from running them for 72 hours (and even then, one drive could fail an hour later).

My understanding is that this law is fairly new. I'm not qualified to interpret it & say one way or the other how completely it covers games consoles or any other item... I'm just saying that there's room for interpretation of this law in a courtroom, and if you were to turn up at ACME Consoles' offices with a dead and 23-month-old AcmeBox then I don't see why they shouldn't choose to say "we don't think this is covered, take us to court & let it be decided there".

Stroller.

[anephric]

Yes. It's fair to say that the EU 2-year thing really doesn't affect the UK anyway, because under the Sale of Goods Act, you've got like 7 years timeframe anyway to challenge the manufacturer - all the EU did was harmonise its member states as some of them only had 6 months (!) warranty from purchase.

[egparadigm]

I was speaking to an MS customer support guy yesterday about my 360 and he said that they are currently working on all those extended warranty forms atm, so I imagine yours is just in a backlog.