“Don’t you die on me!!” Dealing with hardware failures

In this entry, I’d like to ask you all about your experience with console hardware and also computer hardware in general when it comes to gaming. How reliable has it all been for you and if you’ve had any problems, what happened?

Personally, I’ve had very few hardware issues over the years… in fact, I think I’ve only had two issues with consoles and one potentially dangerous issue with one of my computers many years ago. I guess that makes me very lucky considering the horror stories you tend to hear from people on the net about how they lost all of their saved game data or how they’d keep having their consoles replaced only to have the replacements die on them over and over… poor bastards.

My first issue with any console hardware was with my SNES many, many years ago… I tried to turn it on one day to play some Yoshi’s Island and it must’ve blown a fuse or something. Got my mum to send it off to Nintendo and it came back good as new. I think at that time Nintendo were a lot more awesome with their customer service and actually provided lifetime warranties for their products so it was all free.

On the other hand, nowadays they’re a lot more tight-arsed about warranties and only provide 24 month warranties on their hardware. So, when my Wii’s disc drive finally gave out, Nintendo told me that it would cost me $120 Australian to have the drive replaced. Unfortunately, it’s not like I had much choice in the matter, it was either that or lose all of my saved games, VC and WiiWare games I had bought for the system.

It sucks that I have to pay, but it’s not that big of a deal… this kind of hardware failure is rare for a Nintendo product and it’s not like you can 100% avoid it, especially with the way mass production goes and the higher level of technology used each generation. Disc drives by themselves are the real issue when it comes to consoles in general… as soon as consoles switched over from carts to CDs and so on, the overall failure rate of consoles sky-rocketed to new levels.

Anyway, I got my Wii back from Nintendo today, all fixed up… oh and before my Wii’s disc drive broke down, it made this really loud noise as the disc spun for many years… that’s gone now (since there’s a brand new drive in there) so my Wii is back to being the quietest console I own.

Hopefully I don’t end up running in to any more issues in the future… I’m really surprised that my Xbox 360 has survived this long without a problem… I held off getting one specifically because of the hardware failures everyone was having. Even my brother ended up switching to a PS3 after his died… hopefully mine won’t ever die… but at least if it does have an issue, I won’t have to worry about my saved games since they’re on a removable hard drive.

So, what about you guys? What kind of issues have you had with gaming related hardware?