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 $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.
I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:
I hope someone Diggs this and maybe it will get the attention of the person Microsoft who can correct the situation. If they do, I’ll gladly remove this from my blog.
thanks man, this was really useful and I’ll have to check this out before my 1$ month thing goes out.
I really don’t get why they can’t have a system that manually cancels it ON THE XBOX, think about it, how many games do this? even the ones that don’t refund can get you off of the “premium” in about 2 mins max
Thing is, I’m patient with them, (which is strange for a 14 year old) if I have to wait on a phone for 5 hours, I’ll do it, if they charge me for ANOTHER month, I’ll deal with it and figure that I was late on canceling and just pay it again, then call them up to make sure that it is canceled, if it ISN’T cancelled, fine, I’ll re-cancel it, if they charge me AGAIN, expect to see a lot of spray paint with vulgar words all around the microsoft office buildings…
no, I’m kinda more upset with the server quality of XBOX live, you would think that if you pay-to-play, then microsoft’s bitches (their games that they refuse to release to other counsols such as ME and halo) would have excellent servers allowing for maximum gamelpay. nope, F that, I was on my PS3 this morning on untold legends, went into a server and BAM done in less then a minute with no problems, only had to restart once because the microwave screwed with the internet connection, went to play L4D earlier, and was disconnected (not kicked) from the servers about 27 times before I finally found one that didn’t auto-log me out of it when I got in.
my sugestion: if you can deal with the comments about being a noob, just make false email adresses every month and sign up for a new account to get the 1 month of gold free and when you want to play single player games, use your main account which ISN’T Xboxlive/gold
I hate Microsoft now. I payed 1 – month gold membership and when it was over they took my my credit card and without my permission, paid another month! I want Microsoft sued so that they would change their policy
know how infamous microsoft is?
They lost millions of dollers because they tried to pull a monopoly scheme and ended up wiping out about 27 game buisnesses that refused to allow their games to be sold by them.
they are trying to take over the market and kill off the ps3 and wii, unfortunatly nintendo is so friggin rich I doubt they’ll ever beat them (nintendo could buy out the U.S.A. if we weren’t a democracy!)