Microsoft's Xbox 360 is a technical triumph that has been lauded by the hard-to-please, with John C Dvorak saying, "I have not seen a hardware/software system this well thought out for a decade or more." Whereas the original was an underpowered PC, its successor boasts three PowerPC cores running at 3.2GHz, the competition is still in the labs, and it has a ton of games lined up.

But the launch is turning into a Thanksgiving Turkey for Microsoft, with widespread reports of instability, bugs and other glitches marring the $400 console.

The most common of these include failing to load a game, crashing while playing a game and freezes, according to regulars at the Xbox Scene (http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=462099) and Team Xbox (http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=391764).

And what does a crashed Xbox 360 look like?

A bit like this, here (http://www.flickr.com/photos/80491849@N00/65990158/).

Note the interesting multilingual error message, the proportionately spaced fonts and the cool Matrix effect, indicating that this is very much a next-generation BSOD.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters that glitches affected only a "very, very small fraction" of the units shipped, and that "the number of calls was not unexpected". ®

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