I got an Xbox 360 about a year ago with the hope of using it as a media player for my HP Media Vault because it is supposed to be a DLNA-compliant media server. It’s not. You can get it to work by installing Twonkyvision’s server on the Media Vault (which costs another $40), but it won’t stream Divx/xvid-encoded videos, which pretty much renders it useless as a media player in my opinion.
I’m not much of a gamer myself, and so the Xbox 360 hasn’t gotten much use. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to upgrade my Xbox 360 silver membership (which is free) to an Xbox Live Gold membership which costs about $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.
I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:
I hope someone Diggs this and maybe it will get the attention of the person Microsoft who can correct the situation. If they do, I’ll gladly remove this from my blog.
Thanks for the info.
I downgraded my account yesterday.
For the most part a painless experience, took about 10 minutes from start to finish.
i called around march to down grade to silver. they put me on hold for more than five minutes the first time. they told me i had two gamer tags with x box live which was ridiculous, i only had one. on top of that they refused to give me the name of the gamer tag that was supposedly on MY account. i figured i had the right to know cuz….. its MY account but anyways i knew it was a lie. after much argument about it i managed to get downgraded to silver membership. i dont know what happened to the other imaginary gamer tag they said was active monthly. its now july and i havent had another monthly charge since march. i knew the were lying about that other gamer tag.
do you have to tell them your email? cuz if you do im screwed since i upgraded my membership to gold for 1 month and if u have to tell them your email i cant cuz i totally forgot the name and pass of my email