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Bad Xboxes ruin holidays

Hundreds of people who bought Microsoft's hot new Xbox gaming console over the holidays in the US received defective systems, and some said they had to wait weeks and endure shoddy customer service before their systems were fixed.

While analysts say the number of flawed consoles is probably too small to spell serious production troubles, they caution that the long repair times may harm the software giant in its first major foray into hardware.

John Kreis bought an Xbox the day it came out. But the 31-year-old Chicago man's US$300 system stopped working almost immediately. Kreis said it took a month of aggravation with Xbox customer service before he got a replacement.

"The whole thing that was so frustrating [was] just the fact that still to this day I'm waiting for a call back just to explain to me what happened," he said.

AP spoke with about a dozen Xbox users who complained of a game system that never worked or worked for a few hours or days before freezing up. Most called the customer service response poor.

"I'm taking my Christmas decorations down and [my son] hasn't gotten to play with his Christmas toys yet," Debbie Mason, of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, said Thursday.

She had just been told in her ninth call to customer service that, despite an earlier promise that the system would be sent back that day, it turned out to be broken again.

Microsoft sales and marketing director John O'Rourke said fewer than 1 percent of the Microsoft units -- 10,000 units in this case -- have proven faulty. Analysts say that's in line with the industry standard, and competitor Nintendo reported a comparable rate for its new GameCube.

But analyst Rob Enderle of Giga Information Systems warned that a company's response to those customers who do have problems often is more important than how many units actually break.

"If 200 people have a really bad experience and they're vocal, then the impression is the product's bad," he said.

During the Christmas season, Enderle added, any return that takes more than a week is ``a horribly long time.''

For Microsoft, which shipped about 1.5 million Xboxes over the holidays, the stakes are high. With the highly regarded Xbox, the company is battling Nintendo and Sony in a hyper-competitive game console market.
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