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.
What is the no. for Hong kong
Nowadays the workaround is to get a prepaid VISA for the minimum amount of subscription you want and recharge it as you want or don’t if you want to cancel. Corporations are greedy and are not likely to change this behaviour anytime soon. The best way is to cut them off at the knees by not letting them into your pocket in the first place. Consumers have always had the burden of protecting themselves since ancient times. Caveat emptor!
Microsoft automatically charged my old credit card $57 for an XBOX live account I haven’t used in over a year. I protested through the credit card company but MSFT’s lawyers prevailed. I somehow got all the way to XBOX billing management on the phone and they refused to refund me even though I don’t use the service because it was past 60 days, even though I had protested the charge via my credit card company immediately. If you sing up for XBOX live, be prepared to get automatically billed annually for the rest of your life. Worst customer service ever.