I'd have to agree. it's so U-G-L-Y! The tiles or icons or whatever....they are flat, over simplistic, have no depth to them, in bright primary colours. It's horrible! and they are rolling out this butt ugly style across all their products...hotmail, xbox, office 2013. It's terrible. I like having a bit of 3D or depth to the icons I click on.

Plus they've thrown usability out the window with win8. It's pretty piss poor. Hot corners?? W.T.F..... I tried the release previews and the only way I could make win8 vaguely useable was to install classic shell (I even have classic shell installed on a win7 pc coz I didn't like what they did to the start menu - too big and the documents menu has gone). The whole flipping back and forth between the desktop and metro I found to be very jarring and irritating experience....on the desktop pc, why are metro programs fullscreen and bright white? It hurts my eyes. Plus the metro desktop/start screen just shouts bright colours at you.

Microsoft are trying to be a jack of all trades, but it's failing pretty spectacularly. it seems they have lost the plot and I get the distinct impression that they have no clue as to what they ought to be doing anymore.

Just grab classic shell from sourceforge. It's free and the latest version bypasses metro altogether you you don't even get a glimpse of it when you log in :0 When i was testing win8 this little program made it quite bearable. I suspect a lot of people will install one of these 3rd party apps for their friends on win8 just for a bit of piece and quiet :)

I have a nice little side hobby, repairing broken Xbox 360 consoles (RROD, e74, usual stuff). It's been interesting hobby, taken them apart and making them better, i.e. actually fixing the inherent design flaws. Also nice since I've been making a bit on the side. :)

But..... SOOOOOOOO many people have been asking me to flash their drives as part of the repair, or telling me they need the console repairing coz the drive has been flashed and they don't want to buy a new unit and all they have are copies. It's been quite an eye opener....everybody's at it, and the answer is always the same : Games are too expensive, DL DVD's are much cheaper....

I have to admit, I NEVER buy new games, because I feel that they're simply not worth the money they are charging for them. I always buy second hand games for less than half price. Oh, and no, I don't have any copied games....

People. Catch a wake up. You are selling your games for far, far, far more than people (That's your market) think they are worth. DROP YOUR PRICES. You'll:

a) Sell more games.

b) Make more money due to increased volume.

c) Reduce the piracy that you are so concerned about.

Quit being a part of the problem, and start being a part of the solution.

The music and film industry need to come to the same conclusions....the products they sell are worth a *lot* less than they think they are.

Some valid points there mate. I know um, 10 people with a 360. All of them except one has had the RROD failure, so that's a 90% failure rate over here. One guy is on his 3rd (and he's not a heavy gamer); another guy is on his 6th.

List of flaws, wow, where do I begin?

GPU heatsink that is Waaaaaay too small to cope

Fans that run too slowly; not enough cool air being pulled through the heatsinks

Poor fan shroud design - air leaks in around the sides instead of over the heatsinks

Poor quality, thin motherboard that warps easily

Poor quality, brittle lead-free solder

X-clamps pushing up and causing point pressure underneath the GPU and CPU chips

Poor quality and excessive thermal paste being used

Two centre case standoffs higher than the edge of the case (forced warping of the mobo), although I've noticed they've fixed this with the newer 360's and these are now level with the edge of the case where the mobo screws down.

Microsoft cut every corner they could, anywhere they could, to push the 360 through the door as cheaply as possible, and before the PS3 came to market. They are now paying the price, as it's cost them over a billion dollars in repairs. If it were any other company, they would have gone bust or given up on the 360. Microsoft's *cough* attempts at fixing this broken abortion of a console so far include a small extension to the GPU heatsink and epoxying the GPU and CPU chips into place, LMAO - these still break...

Reflowing the cracked solder underneath the GPU chip followed by the HYBRID X-clamp repair, then pushing 12 volts through both fans and modding the shroud by sealing it up around the edges and covering the GPU heatsink, then adding mini heatsinks to the exposed RAM chips, the HANA chaip and the Southbridge chip, is a pretty robust and long lasting repair.
Other than this, the 360 needs a complete and fundamental redesign to prevent the RROD/e74 and related errors.

Yep, absolutely. It was curiosity...I bought it specifically so that I could take it apart, laugh at its numerous eye-popping design flaws and make it better.

Had it not been such a crappy console, I would never have bought one. :)

The last PC game I bought was Half Life 2. Unfortunately in order to play it, i needed to have a 'steam' account and an active internet connection. Worse, this game was locked to the account and I couldn't sell it or or even give it away. So I never bought another PC game...game over as far as I was concerned

I bought a broken xbox360 (RROD) console off fleabay really cheaply, fixed it up using a heatgun and the Team HYBRID x-clamp fix. I've got about half a dozen games for it now, (e.g. Bioshock, GoW, GoW 2, Assasin, Lego Indiana Jones) ALL of them are pre-owned. I have absolutely no intention of ever buying a new game. Why? They are too expensive, and frankly *not* worth the money new. They need to halve the price of new games before I'll consider buying a new game. Same with the xbox 360. Why waste money a new xbox360 for £170 when it will break after a year, when you can get a broken one off eBay for £35 including postage, fix it in a couple of hours and for minimal cost? I do not have a live gold account, as I have no intention of playing online - why should I pay? To play online with the wii costs nothing.

Best thing about this, Microsoft haven't received a penny off me. So what are they gonna do, try and stop people reselling their poorly designed crappy little consoles? Haha I'd like to see them try... ;)

To game developers out there who may be reading this: LOWER YOUR PRICES. You charge too much. The fact that pre-owned games are selling so well is symptomatic of this, so wise up, what you are seeing is a market correction ;)

You can fly direct to Costa Rica from Canada, (Air Canada) or fly direct to Mexico. From there, you can get a TACA flight, or Mecicana to anywhere in Central America. Thank God there are ways to avoid transiting through the USA.