So it appears that it’s true:the squeeky wheel does eventually get the grease.

I never expected my little rant to hit the front page of digg, but apparently Microsoft bashing is a national geek sporting event now.

It also seems that I wasn’t alone in having problems.

After I started a thread at xbox.com, it took only 14 hours until somebody on the site fixed my problem. I got a nice private message telling me my points had been returned. No phone call yet, like I was promised, but I got want I wanted, so I’m not complaining.

I got PM at the site informing me they had looked into my problem and refunded me my points. I turned on the 360, and sure enough, my 480 points had been returned.

As for my thread, I got a nice response about how people should try contacting customer service again. Of course the post was at about 2:30 est, and the customer service number closes at 1am, but I won’t nit-pick. Apparently people MAY be able to call in the morning and actually get refunds over the phone.

Also: they locked the thread. They also don’t want to seem to waste too much forum space at xbox.com letting customer’s complain. But that’s their prerogative. I just find that interesting. (People should feel free to rant here as much as they want).

But getting my points back was only the first step. What I really wanted was an HD movie rental. And I can’t just give up now. Too many people have hit my site. I had thousands of visitors today, and it was a HOLIDAY. I can’t imagine what would have happened if it had been a workday.

So I can’t let all my fans and critics down. I must rent this movie. Even if this movie DOES suck (according to some) - it’s the principal of the thing.

So before I did anything else, I went back to video marketplace, and promptly spent my refund. Same movie. Same price.

And (drum roll please)… no error!

Of course before I was renting at 8:45pm EST on launch day, and now I’m renting it at 2:45 am while most people are knocked out from turkey and beer. But it’s still nice to see it does seem to work.

It’s been almost 45 minutes since my purchase, and I now have a nice little line in my active downloads saying “V for Vendetta - 0% complete!“. It seems to like that 0% number.

Now assuming that the counter is right, should I try to extrapolate how long I will have to wait? If it means that 45 minutes of download time is less than 1%, making this something at least a 4500 minute (75 hours) download?!? I’m going to be optimistic and assume that the counter is really lousy, or there is some temporary bandwith issue.

I only have 2 weeks to watch it, so I hope it finishes before my two weeks are up!

I’ll try to keep track of how long it takes to download this thing. I’m going to go turn off the “6 hour auto-off” timer, because I’m pretty sure this xbox is going to need more than that to finish this download.

Keep posted. I’ll announce as soon as I have a full download.

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