Due to recent experiences, I’m reminded of the fact that the XBox 360 doesn’t include a clock that works when the power is off. With just a few seconds of research, I was able to confirm that the PC-AT (released in 1984) had a real time clock that could keep time when the unit wasn’t plugged in. My Mac keeps the clock without it’s power cord. So did all my PCs, various other consoles, clock radios, etc.
Yet my 360 doesn’t do this. When I moved, it lost it’s time sitting in a box for a month or two. When I unplugged it for a few hours to plug something else in, it lost it’s time.
When I unplugged it so that I could plug it into a bigger power strip 5 minutes later, it lost track of the time.
So every time something like that happens, I get to reset it. It doesn’t take a reasonable guess, it resets it’s self to launch day or so: November 25th, 2005.
Now in a stupid device, this would be unacceptable. All it takes is a little real time clock circuit to maintain the correct time for months without power. It’s trivially simple.
Yet the 360 can’t do it. Worse than that is that it is connected to the internet. This means that it could easily ping a timeserver and ask what time it is. That would be fine with me. Maybe it wouldn’t get the exact time right (due to timezones), but it could at least get the year right. Every time I boot the thing up and go to play GTA4, it signs in to XBox live. It finds out my gamer score, what I’ve been playing recently, if I have friends online, what new games are available, and many other things. But it doesn’t know what time it is.
I’m submitting this as a bug to Microsoft.
