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Aug202010
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Xbox 360 |
This week I broke down and bought my first XBOX 360. The $200, 4 GB model was too cheap to pass up. It came in the mail on Wednesday and I set it up late that night after work. Having not been entirely thorough in my research led me to several disappointments in short order. My unit’s lack of a hard drive means I can’t play any of my old XBOX games. I was also dismayed to learn that Netflix instant watch requires an XBOX live gold membership in addition to a Netflix subscription for no apparent reason.
My frustrations were compounded later by separate troubles with my computer. One of the primary motivations for buying an XBOX was for an easy way to play content from my computer on the TV. I’ve been using TVersity to stream stuff to a PS3 with reasonable success but that stopped working. Internet connection sharing wouldn’t start so I was unable to connect the Xbox directly to my computer and Windows Media Center would not communicate with the Xbox when I finally got Wi-Fi working. I finally surrendered early in the morning with very little working.
On Thursday I formatted my computer to solve all the problems on that end. I got Windows Media Center to work partially but it would not be recognized again after restarting the Xbox or my computer. TVersity is working so I decided to stick with that. I also upgraded my Live account sooner than I would have liked and tried out Netflix. It works quite well and seems to look a lot better than its PS3 counterpart.
An entirely separate computer problem presented itself on Wednesday. One of my new Dell 2209WA monitors died. A dark and distorted picture accompanied a persistent high pitched whining sound when it is on. Since I bought my new screens on eBay I wasn’t sure I would have any luck invoking the warranty. I was content to pay for a repair but apparently they don’t actually fix things… At least that’s what I gathered from a seemingly confused Indian woman I was speaking with. Eventually I located an order number on the shipping label of the box and from there I was able to get a warranty replacement ordered.