Well kiddies, it finally happened. No, I'm not going slightly mad; my Xbox 360 has officially decided to call it quits. the Red Ring of Death has arrived and refuses to leave. In the coming weeks -- perhaps months -- I will be chronicling its repair here on X3F.
The Red Ring of Death made its first visit about a week ago, after some extended sessions of Crackdown. It popped up on a few other occasions throughout the week, but would go away after a brief period of downtime. Finally, after a quick local session of Bomberman Live with my friends, the next power cycle produced a red ring that won't go away. For the record, my 360 was situated as you see it above. It was vertical, in completely open air, and placed at a diagonal angle behind my TV in a very feng shui kind of way. Considering that fateful game of Bomberman had been the first time my close friends and I had played the game since the Saturn Bomberman days of yore, I find the timing to be somewhat poetic. Or perhaps overtly cruel. Depends on how you look at it I guess.
The next day (yesterday) I placed a call to Xbox customer support. The first step in one of these calls is to argue with an unhelpful automaton for a few minutes. After exhausting every combination of unplugging, replugging, and hard drive removal, I was finally directed to an agent. Or, rather, I was directed to some very upbeat hold music. After several minutes of tapping my toes to the beat, I was connected with a human being. The agent was perfectly polite, no hassles or anything like that. He took down my shipping info and told me that my coffin would ship out in 5 to 7 days. He then hit me with gut-wrenching information that the repair itself would take 4 to 6 weeks. Ouch. And yes, if you've extended those dates out to their extremes, that gets my Xbox back to me just days before the release of Halo 3, and that's without adding any shipping time. Now I know what it's like to live every moment of my life in fear.
Next time on the Red Ring Chronicles: the coffin.
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 6)
8-02-2007 @ 12:37PM
ccc said...
How long have U had Ur 360?
And when they end up sending U a refurbished 360 let me know how well they handle the Ms point reembursing considering all the arcade games and content U purchesed was registered under the old system.
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8-02-2007 @ 12:38PM
woejilliams said...
Something I have always wondered about the red ring of death that we may be able to answer here, anecdotally at least. What is your physical set up of the Xbox. Where is it located? Is it next to other electronics? Is it on the carpet? Do you have things setting on it? Is it 3 inches away from the wall? I am not blaming anyone but MS for the problem but it occurs to me that a lot of people may not consider allowing for all that heat to get away from the box. Long gone are the days of the Super Nintendo where you could set the machine on shag carpet and lay a blanket over it and you wouldn't have a problem.
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8-02-2007 @ 12:39PM
Matt V said...
I got mine back in less than 3 weeks when it broke back in May.
All in all, it was a pretty painless process, even though I did miss some of the Halo 3 beta.
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8-02-2007 @ 12:40PM
Mike said...
I'm not trying to rub this in but this is the reason why I never had and never will own a M$ console..
I dont care how long the warranty is, if it doesnt last then I'm not going to waste my time. Electronics break, its retail but this 33% or potentially 100% failure rate is ridiculous...
I wish you guys the best and hope you get your 360s back in time to enjoy some serious gaming this holiday season.
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8-02-2007 @ 12:45PM
ANt said...
@5 Do us all a favor and go away.....far far away.
I can't wait until your 360 dies on you!!
Hopefully it will be three days before a title that you really really want comes out.
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8-02-2007 @ 12:59PM
David said...
I too have just joyously received the RED-RING-O-DEATH. However, the interesting thing is, I predicted it. I guessed that if it was going to happen, it would happen in the heat of summer-late July/early August. And it arrived right on schedule. I didn't even play the damn thing for a week, as I was out of the country. But as soon as I fired it up upon my return...Plop...total freeze/RED DEATH.
I'm curious as to how many other people are getting zapped in the summer months. (And yes, I do have A/C, but it's not on all the time when I am out of my house.)
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8-02-2007 @ 1:10PM
Tony said...
@woejilliams
I really don't think this is an issue anymore. If anything, it's part of a very small amount of the issue. Richard's post is pretty clear that he had it wide open.
My brothers' was wide open, including the power supply. No carpet. They got the error and just got theirs back.
Mine was wide open, same as the power supply, tons of room, never even really got hot. I even propped it up so that the vents underneath let out air (I use mine horizontally). I still got the problem.
People who complain of this issue months after having the thing are most likely to have a general hardware issue. If they kept it in confined hot quarters all of the time, the thing would freeze up constantly, I'd bet.
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8-02-2007 @ 1:10PM
Iliad Force said...
@ 15 (Jeff):
Is your system Elite or Premium or Core? You're sure the thing was manufactured in July '07?
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8-02-2007 @ 1:11PM
jdubya said...
mine has been acting up for sometime now, rrod a few times, but basically i got the freezing problem - if its been off for a couple of hours and completely cool, i could play for 20 minutes or so before pgr3/crackdown. I had sonic the hedgehog freezeon me a couple of times.
I decided i'd had enough.. right before i called to request a coffin, i was getting 1 light in the bottom right of the ring. Also error message E 71.
My coffin arrived yesterday and UPS is supposed to be here this afternoon to take it in.
I had to cancel my gamefly and pre-orders.
Because i don't know how long im going to be without it.
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8-02-2007 @ 1:13PM
Jason said...
I recently sent my 360 in (beginning of July) and received a new replacement 3 weeks and two days later.
The new unit did have the new heat sink, which should help reduce the chances of the red rings returning.
To check for the new heat sink, see:
http://www.weplayxbox.com/2007/06/20/feeling-cool-how-to-tell-if-your-repaired-xbox-360-has-the-new-additional-heatsink/
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8-02-2007 @ 1:14PM
zduclos said...
ha i have never had a 360 problem but i think it might come with halo 3 ( my luck) i cant believe you ppl dont get free repair and buy a new one you mine as well buy like 5 incase one dies or you can system link...if mine dies i'll just "borrow" a 360 from a friend
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8-02-2007 @ 1:18PM
zduclos said...
hey richard now you will finally stop playing retro crap and do some real blogging instead of making dustin do it all
(jk)
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8-02-2007 @ 1:28PM
Hannes The Hun said...
well, according to all my relatives and friends who happen to also have a 360 in their dearly posession, I'm now the fourth one having his console die on him. mind you, one of 'em even has his SECOND repaired console on the way back to him.
no red lights, just sudden freezes about 3 minutes into ANY game since sunday. just take a look at the gorgeous new Gears of War graphical effects!
http://tbhl.blogspot.com/2007/07/so-meine-xbox360-gibt-jetzt-auch-den.html
As you probably have guessed from the link, I happen to be a german, and according to german xbox support, it takes around 25 days at the moment to get a "repaired" one.
my humble investigation tells me that at the moment, defect consoles are piling up in the MS repair centers in europe, because all they're doing is shipping a brand new manufactured console out to the marauding fans ASAP and are probably trashing the defunct ones right away with a caterpillar or something.
yikes, glad Steve "going postal" Ballmer wrote a billion dollar cheque for this shit. geesh.
don't get me wrong, i love my 360 and the awesome games (most of 'em i had to import anyways because of the fucked up german censorship laws), but this is one of the biggest desasters the video games industry has ever seen, and i'm in since the glory days of atari 2600.
that ugly fucker never died on me until today and maybe never will, by the way.
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8-02-2007 @ 1:34PM
Hannes The Hun said...
by the way, because of these dumbass comments "i would never buy a console manufactured by MS"
my first-day Xbox1, heavily modded and molested by some haulings over the past few years, never made any problems at all and still is running perfectly fine. someone fucked up the genuine 360 system design while the xbox1 was more or less a PC, and they had to get it out way before the PS3. that's the whole problem. but at least MS are kinda taking care of the customers in making this replacement process as pleasing as possible.
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8-02-2007 @ 1:34PM
Mike Jenkins said...
Drem, I also called on July 5 and I am still waiting for mine to come back, it was supposed to be delivered today but it it now delayed and should come in tomorrow.
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8-02-2007 @ 1:44PM
knight667 said...
Welcome to the sad RRoD club. :( I got mine last week, it should be reaching the repair facility today. I'm also chronicling my 360's resurrection on my blog: http://knight667-gaming.blogspot.com
Hope yours comes back to you soon!
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8-02-2007 @ 1:48PM
Jeff said...
@ 48 (Iliad Force)
It was a Premium that was sent back and replaced. Yeah, I'm sure on the date... it says "2007 - 07 - 14 :MFR Date"
I had been looking for an Elite system, but couldn't find it in stock. The day after my Premium was busted I found the Elite on Amazon and had it shipped next day. Now the new Premium is sitting comfortably at work and the Elite is at home.
Offtopic gripe... I hate having to share my Gamertag across two consoles and constantly have to re-claim it. I wish there was an easier way without having to carry a small item back and forth. Isn't the internet supposed to allow logins from multiple locations?
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8-02-2007 @ 1:57PM
Michael Paul said...
So, have they eased the hassle involved in linking Xbox Live games to a specific console, or are people getting 'new' units going to suffer through that, too?
I'd prefer mine be repaired, but carefully repaired so it never fails again. Next best would be a replacement unit so new it's got the cooler-running chipset in it. Anything else, like some refurbished unit they didn't send back to its original owner or an untested unit that has never been sold, would probably work out badly...
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8-02-2007 @ 1:58PM
xenocidic said...
Calling every day to inquire as to the status of your repair seems to help. After the 3rd call, they escalate it to a supervisor who can wave a magic wand and get a new (read: refurb) box out to you post-haste.
at least in Canada. not sure about the U.S.A.
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8-02-2007 @ 2:06PM
Hannes The Hun said...
the live stuff still seems to be kinda heavily linked to a specific console with specific serial, but after this whole replacement desaster started, they made it easier to "reclaim" your downloaded AND ALREADY PAID FOR content by simply logging into your live account and downloading the stuff again.
by the way, we germans already had a hard time getting additional content for Gears Of War or any other game that MS wouldn't release here, they completely went postal in prohibiting this content to german customers, same thing for violent demos or arcade DOOM. completely sucks, I'm a fucking adult, and they still prohibit that stuff to me.
ah well, for starting two world wars, we probably deserve this...
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