Ever since I got my xbox, it has had a problem when displaying. It doesn’t happen constantly, or even consistently. But every time I play, the display will go all crazy and start acting very jittery. It’s hard to describe but basically the picture remains intact but gets shifted left and right really fast. There may even be a small up/down component to it. Obviously, it can be very difficult to play the game for the 2-5 seconds that it continues to do this. I thought it was a bug that everyone experienced when in 1080i, though I could find no one else mentioning it on the net. When I first contacted Microsoft about it, they blamed it on me. They stated I needed to change the hardware settings to the output of the game (i.e. 720P for almost everything). I tried explaining to them that the native resolution of my TV is 1080i and that everything ended up as a 1080i signal, it fell on deaf ears.
My experience with support though suggested to me that it was a common problem. Well after dealing with it for months, I mentioned it to my brother. He has the same native resolution and he told me he has no problems at all. So we swapped xboxes and I couldn’t reproduce the problem after several hours of playing. I’m going to keep his for a few more days to verify. But, I called support and told them I didn’t have this problem on my TV with a different xbox. Their fix for the problem was hilarious. Here it is:
1.) Play one of the games that you experience the problem with (all games, coincidentally). 2.) When the problem occurs, yank the power from your xbox and then all other cables (while it is still on). 3.) Unplug all the wall cables. 4.) Plug everything back in again.
I thought those were odd steps. Who ever heard of a manufacturer telling you to not do a graceful shutdown on your computer hardware? At least they conceded that if that doesn’t fix the problem that they will repair the unit. So we’ll see what happens to my poor little xbox.
It DOES happen when I use my brother’s xbox on my TV but it is not nearly as bad. It only happens for like one or two frames rather than 3-5 seconds like it does on mine.