I bought an 360 elite when it first came available just for the HDMI, and waited until my MS warranty was up to mod the firmware on my drive. I like to play the Asian games that are not even available to play in the USA anyway. So, that being said, MS would no longer cover my 360 if it died, and i never played any of those games on live, just on another local account on the unit. Then not too long ago, I plugged it into the net to check out some of the new updates, and now i cant play on live at all. So even after they rule out the possibility of a factory repair, and limiting my gaming to releases that are only available to the USA (what? I cant convert the video sequences or remove them because of PAL/NTSC incompatibilities) all of a sudden i'm banned? I have no "backups(AKA illegal rips)" all of my games were purchased outright, so i have the legal licenses. Why must I buy a foreign console and own two (consoles) to be able to play those? This is a very blanket ban that does not take into consideration the intent of individual users. I would have much rather had my account banned, or even the FW on the drive flashed to OEM then having my $500 out of warranty non unbannable unit forever banished from the net. MS, this was not the proper way to treat people, you are just as much of an ******* as Steve Jobs is about flash and such (and i'm a jailbroken iPhone 2g user that has been very happy for over 2.5 years)
I bought a PC, it had windows, I formatted and installed linux, the unit has a 1 year warranty and the power supply died afer 4 months. Are you not going to replace it because I prefer Ubuntu? Shame on you.
I have my original FW for my drive, just as i made a vista recovery disc for my pc. I can restore either at any time.
So, that's my two cents worth,