Category: Modern problems

Back in the day Xbox required that it’s users convert CASH into Microsoft Points. For people like me this meant that over time we accumulated credits.

Recently Microsoft decided that the points were going to be phased out in favor of straight cash transactions.

Now those credits have been converted back to a cash value (At no interest) Microsoft has also started a countdown to forfeiture of the credit amount in our account.

Here’s the bone.

I can’t spend that money on anything except a game, rental, or purchase of movies, or purchase of music. 

Okay so I want to buy a game. 

It costs 59.95. I have 45.65 on account. So logically you’d think that Microsoft would say

59.95-45.65 = 13.30 

Then offer to take the 13.30 + taxes from my credit card.

You’d be wrong!

They want to bill the entire amount to my credit card and leave me with the 45.65 still to spend and still to expire on June 1.

This is exactly WHY I hated the whole converting money to credits in the first place. 

Additionally Microsoft won’t let me use the credit to pay for my xbox gold membership or pay for anything else from the Microsoft line as far as I can tell.

I feel really screwed over this and I find myself thinking that the next game console I purchase will likely be from Sony. Xbox Live is expensive on a yearly basis if you’re only an occasional player and it’s a pain in the ass to sign up once in a while if you’re not sure that you’re going to be playing online. 

At the same time you practically have to have the Xbox Live account active because if you don’t, then decide to turn it on you have to deal with updates and more updates and more updates before you can play the freaking game you wanted to play.

I went through that today. I just wanted to play Call of Duty.  BUZZZZ! There are updates required…

After navigating a counterintuitive user interface to select the game I wanted to play then to be told I couldn’t play the game because there was a required update, then waiting for that update I’d already gone on to other things and wasn’t interested anymore. The downloads finished and I turned the machine off.

Am I impatient? Probably!

But sometimes you only have a half hour to play and updates like that really cramp your style.

So Microsoft… here are a couple of things you might want to consider.

1) My account should be my account across all your product lines. Credit balance or not.

2) Learn to freakin do math!

3) You better really come up with some seriously awesome games because I’ve seen the Sony Playstation render games (DAMN!) and it also includes a nice BluRay player!

But most of all, 

We as customers shouldn’t be thought of as “Fish in a Barrel”

I’m writing this on a Mac, I have office and I like the Office 365 preview you’ve been kind enough to share.

BUT…

I also have viable alternatives to Office, Windows, Skype, and in fact your entire product line. You might want to be a little more “Customer Friendly”

Just saying…

After fiddling around with backups, networks, dropping WiFi connections, and a myriad of other tiny annoying issues I came to the conclusion that I’d have quite enough of death by a thousand cuts!

I just yanked out two 7 year old Apple time capsules and the NetGear router that was freaking awesome when I bought it, but which became a complete POS with subsequent firmware upgrades.

With each “Upgrade” the machine got slower. Now its to the point that the device is now almost completely useless. (Before you ask, I’ve downgraded the unit to previous versions of the firmware. It doesn’t help. At some point, there must have been a hardware module that was reprogrammed, but is not being flashed to its original state. Or theres something really wrong with the device itself.)

The Time Capsules were very reliable over their lifespans. The larger of the two units WiFi had become unreliable and that’s what prompted me to purchase the NetGear. I was trying to save money by replacing the WiFi and continuing to use the hard drives in the Time Capsules.

Recently the drives were becoming increasingly unreliable and the NetGear device had become way too SLOW to do any kind of WiFi to disk transfer. In fact the NetGear unit was slowing data transfers down on wired connections too. 

Although the NetGear bought me a year, I should have done what I did yesterday instead of going cheap…

Yesterday, I bought a new 3TB Apple Time Capsule. If this one lasts 7 years like the previous units it’s replacing, I’ll have gotten my money out of it.

Best Buy is running a $50 off special on the unit so there is that.

This also simplified the network cabinet considerably, I was able to remove 2 devices completely.

This little cabinet is where all the communications in the house is accessible. Phone line, cables for TVs in whatever rooms and of course al the networking. I do wish that when the installation people for the Satellite TV and the Satellite internet had been a bit more frugal with the lengths of the cable they were running. It’s a pain in the butt fighting with 8 or 10 RG58 & RG56 cables that run along the back of the top shelf. 

In a fit of annoyance yesterday, I mounted a spitter and some kind of power unit from DirecTV to the top and rear wall of the cabinet. I shouldn’t have had to do that, the installation guy should have done it. I didn’t notice until after the installation guy split, that he’d not mounted these things, having them rattling around in the top of the cabinet was a royal pain in the ass anytime I needed to do something up there.

I still need to purchase a set of CAT6 patch cables of the correct length to connect the switch to all the wall sockets and peripherals. But the cabinet is once again clean and in general orderly.

I can provide Gigabit speed ethernet throughout the house. Once I pick up the patch cables all but one of the ports on the switch will be connected (Yes, I have 13 sockets in the house. Hey I wanted to be prepared for whatever! You never know when you might have to supplement NORAD…)  

Currently, not all the devices in the house can take advantage of gigabit due to their age, but the potential is there as equipment is updated.

Success! I’ve moved the salvageable data from the older drives onto the new Time Capsule. I haven’t flushed those units quite yet. I’ll wait until the new TC is past its infant mortality period. Then its low level format time and reset to factory defaults for everything I’ve yanked out of the network. (Quite a pile now.) Then it is away to E-Recycling for all of it, I hate trashing this stuff, I wish to heck it was repairable. 

Its not a sentimental attachment, its hating the thought of adding to the e-waste problem. I’d really appreciate Apple or whoever making products that could be retrofitted with the latest technology.  

Take my MacBook Air for example. It’s a fantastic machine. Because I purchased the full boat machine with all the upgrades available at the time, it still beats many of the new Apple Machines including the new Macbook, and all of the Macbook Airs.

There are two areas that are starting to become dated. 1) WiFi and 2) The display is not a retina display.

As of this writing new Macbook Airs aren’t available with a retina display anyway.

It would be very cool to hand Apple my Air, plunk some cash on the table and have them upgrade the WiFi, the display and hell, why not throw a 1TB SSD in the machine while they’re at it.

Because… I am sentimentally attached to my Macbook.

I suppose it would cut into their sales a bit but they’d be SUPER Green if they offered that option.

I can swap out the current 512 SSD drive for a 1TB SSD through Other World Computing. It only costs about $500 or so. I’m not that slammed for disk space yet but when I get there, I’ll go for it. Hopefully It’ll extend the life of my Air for another 4 years.

Oh Cool! Thus far, I’m seeing major speed improvements on data being moved to the network drives and my backups are now taking only 6 minutes instead of a projected 8 hours.

I’m such a dumbass, I saved $150 bucks last year only to subject myself annoyances and troublshooting that cost far more in terms of my time, lost data, and general frustration, than the savings.

OH well… Live and freaking learn!