The Inevitable X-Box360 Post
October 20, 2007
After a quick round of Halo3 slayer my 360 croaked a couple of weeks ago. Anyone that owns an X-Box fears the dreaded red ring of death, where overheating causes the chips to deform and detach off the motherboard. Retailers estimate it affects about 30% of all units, anecdotal experience points to a figure north of that. This isn’t really news or anything, but if finally happened to me so I get to bitch about it now.
My current repair timeline:
October 7th
360 died, called into Microsoft. Not a terrible call, but tech support took 3 tries before getting all my info correctly.
October 11th
“The Coffin” arrives at work, I ship back the dead unit to Microsoft immediately. I get home and find 2 more coffins on my doorstep for the incorrectly opened trouble tickets.
October 15th
Dead X-Box received in TX.
I called in yesterday and it is still currently under repair. I’ve read some users getting a refurb unit being sent immediately, but apparently that didn’t happen for me. Microsoft is spending a billion dollars “fixing” this problem and yet they couldn’t cross-ship a working unit to me so that the turnaround time would be shorter than 4-6 weeks (that was the estimate given to me by tech support). Now I get to wait around while Microsoft is on the clock. Tick. Tock.
Posted in Endless Whining
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October 22nd, 2007 at 9:23 am
I did that Best Buy thing where they’ll just give you a brand new one, but I don’t know what that means i/t/o the hard drive. Can I transfer data off and put it on the new one, should the unthinkable occur?
Also what is your Live ID. Maybe we can hang out more in “cyber space” and shoot each other when your 360 comes back
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I’m not sure how Best Buy handles that, actually. You can transfer stuff off the hard drive onto a memory card but if your red rings appear suddenly, then you might still be hosed.
You’d be losing saved games, but a lot of the other stuff is tied to your XBox Live profile, so I think you’d be OK there.