An update as promised.
After a bit of effort I finally got through to someone at Microsoft customer services who understood what customer service is about. Their reasoning, and further digging would indicate that they are right in this regard, is that strictly speaking the legislation is to do with the shop where the product was bought, but if I had no joy with the shop then they would be willing to fix it, free of charge. I suspect that the fact that I got a complete muppet on Saturday and a supervisor who refused to come to the phone helped.
With that in mind I contact the customer support line of the store from which it was bought. At first they attempted to give me the normal line about the warranty only being one year, so they had no obligation to replace it. Fortunately I already had several pages from the DTI website open on my desktop, so I was not able to just quote the relevant legislation to them, but also to point out that their FAQ specifically covers this sort of response from a shop and that their claims about not being responsible after a year were not actually legal. They did attempt to argue about how they interpreted the legislation, obviously I pointed out that I would consider information on the DTI site to be a fairly reliable source.
Anyway, after a bit of back and forth they have finally conceded to replace the XBox with a new one. They argued that they were doing it just to resolve the issue, but I suspect that is merely so they don`t have to explicitly admit they were right and risk setting a precedent. The bonus is that I`ll get the one that came with a fat controller replaced with one with an S-controller.
Needless to say, this has all taken a bit of an effort on my part, but it shows that if you persist you can exercise your legal rights. I'd also like to note that while the customer service representative of the shop did attempt to dismiss the issue at first, they were willing to listen to the issue when I did push my case and dealt with it appropriately, so at the end of the day I`m generally pleased with the service I got there. I would assume that they are trained to respond to queries of this nature with the stock responses, but the fact that they did bother to check up and deal with it is the fact that pleases me.
So, a quick trip in to town tomorrow and I`ll have a shiny new XBox
