I see nothing on their site either, but a call into their tech support does confirm it. It's on their greeting message.

That's a funny picture...but it's not a surprise. I've already "handled" six of these for friends. For those that ask why you'd do this, the answer is simple. Vista is an overly complex, bloated, and sloooow operating system. In the six that I've done, the performance increase after "upgrading" to XP is astounding. XP takes a mediocre Vista system and turns it into a screamer. The tough thing, is that some manufacturers, like HP, refuse to offer XP support for some models. So, some machines require a little digging around at Intel, nVidia, ATI, etc. to locate the correct XP drivers. HP even went so far as to tell the laptop owner that, "You can't install XP on that system. It won't work." Funny guys, those techs at HP.

Somehow, I'm not at all shocked by this news, in fact, I was waiting for it and was curious to see if MS would be honest about it...anybody who has played both can easily see that there is a lot of depth in COD4 that just simply isn't present in Halo 3. That is NOT to say Halo 3 is a "bad" game...it just doesn't have the same kind of re-playability or hook. I like them both, but truth be told, Master Chief hasn't been in my 360 since COD4 launch day. Now, if COD4 only had the forge, saveable replays, and online stat checking.

Agreed. MS has been tight lipped about this whole situation from day one, even before the lawsuit. Sure, MajorNelson had been able to tell us they are working on it...blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Tell us what is broken...don't give us some BS about LIVE being overwhelmed.

Their excuse of the Christmas boom just doesn't cut it with me. MS was in better position than anybody else to know how many new consoles were in the wild. Why didn't they plan accordingly? Simply unbelievable, seeing as how LIVE is still jacked up most of the time. Many of us are still having problems with very slow load times for the system blades, and on top of it, multiplayer games seem to be far more laggy since late December than they ever were before. In short, LIVE is still experiencing major problems, but according to MS, LIVE is "Up and Running."

If only the PS3 had any games I was interested in.

A class action suit is for everybody...their $5 million claim is not just from themselves.

Ok, my last comment on the subject...at least until I go home, try to login into COD4, and am once again disappointed and pissed. Anyway, at $50 per Gold account, with 10 million Gold subscribers, that is $500,000,000 or in other terms 1/2 BILLION dollars PER YEAR MS generates from charging us for the service. And some of you are telling us that we don't "deserve" a refund? We should "expect" this service to occasionally go down? What planet are you folks from?

Actually, both cable and phone providers DO give you a refund when their service goes down. All you have to do is call them.

I'd agree with the comment that EGM has been "Maxim"-ized. I wish they'd stop that crap. Anyway, I'm sure Ubisoft was cheesed about the AC score. However, EGM has also given many, many of Ubi's games very high scores. WTF?? Are they a bunch of babies that can't take a little criticism? I've yet to meet anybody who truly thought AC was a brilliant game...so EGM was not alone. And finally, EGM in all of their coverage leading up to the actual review was very, very cautious in "hyping" AC. I don't have the mags in front of me at the moment, but if I recall, they wrote about questions, concerns, and issues they had with the builds of AC they'd seen up to that point in time.

The facts are correct, PER USER. However, taking his .82 cents and multiplying it by 10 million, the number of LIVE GOLD accounts MS claims to have, that calculates out to $8.2 Million that MS gets to keep having provided almost zero service during the dates in question. I don't know about the rest of you, but "something" tells me a company should not be able to pocket that kind of cash without providing something in return. Oh, and as others are surely going to point out, the service STILL isn't back to 100%.

Wow, lots of Vista lovers out there...far more than I'd ever "met" before. Wonder if these folks are MS plants? Ha! Just kiddin. Anyway, I've been running SP1 for Vista for a while now on a Lenovo T60 laptop with a couple gigs of memory and a fairly robust ATI graphics card. Unfortunately, there's not much in the SP to be happy about. The big problems are still present. Near constant HD activity...it drives me freaking batty. How much indexing can it possibly be doing? I still have occasional issues waking up a hibernating laptop. Why? CPU usage and Mem usage are still simply out of control. App launches are still typically slower on Vista than on XP. Vista looks nice, but outside of the over hyped directX 10 and bit locker, there is absolutely no reason to have Vista when XP just SCREAMS on the same hardware. Here's hoping that SP2 is the magic bullet.