It Might Have Been Worse (Xbox One Implodes)

Cute Dog Picture - Sir Calvin Wagglytail

With certain pieces of kit - and in particular tools that you use for work  - when they have proven to have long-term reliability, having one give up the ghost can be doubly as disturbing as it might be under other circumstances.

My Xbox One is just such a beast - having delivered long-term stability and reliability since literally day one of its release, when it started acting oddly last week the coincidence of it just getting an update had the effect of causing me to assume that the odd behavior was related to that.

It turned out though that the odd behavior I was noticing was actually the only brief warning I was to receive that the Xbox One was about to suffer a catastrophic hardware failure that lead to what a legion of Xbox users now call "The Black Screen of Death."

Fortunately for me while the console was out of warranty for almost all other issues, the BSoD was one that it was still covered for - but considering that a rapid turn-around would mean 6 weeks or more of downtime while the slab was dispatched to the repair depot, it was still a catastrophe.

But dispatch the slab to the repair depot I did - and ten immediately paid a visit to our local GameStop where a replacement was purchased.  

Expectations of the Worse

When we returned home and replaced the old kit with the new - new power brick, new console, new cables - I fully expected to be faced with a week or more of reinstalling digital downloads.  Because when you are replacing a console, that is what happens.  Or so I thought.

I like to think of this as serendipity...  When I first bought my original Xbox One the 500GB hard drive in it seemed awful small to me - especially when I considered the large number of games I would be getting to review in the immediate future in the form of digital download codes.

In consequence of that, one of the first things I did was to pick up a 2TB external drive.  And as it turns out that was a wicked good move!

When I booted up my new X1 for the first time, after its 268MB patch, it promptly added the external drive and all of the games installed to it without even blinking!  In fact with the exception of just the three titles that were installed to the internal hard drive for the old X1 I did not have to do ANY downloading at all!

Can you imagine that?

So mates - my advice to you if you own an Xbox One is this: buy and USE an external drive for all of your game installs!  It is cheap insurance that will save you a lot of time.  This might have been oh so much worse.