Xbox 360 Fanboy

Here's my post from the xbox.com forum:

I have a launch date 360 that I played pretty regularly (not an insane amount, but it wasn't collecting dust by any means) and last night I started it up as I always did and...boom...frozen during the initial start-up screen. I restarted it and got only a black screen and the accompanying blinking red lights of death. So I do what support says--unplug the cables, plug them back in, no go. I call them up--is the power brick plugged into a surge protector, they ask? Sure is. So they tell me to unplug it (the Brick already has a surge protector) and plug it directly into the wall. I do it--same problem. Did you unplug the hard drive? Yep, nothing.

Now we get to the awesome part--that 90 day guarantee. Well, bad news. I'm well past that 90 day expiration date for it. But the customer service agent helpfully offers the information that, since there were so many problems reported with those initial 360s, that Microsoft had extended the guarantee until May 8th! "Uh, that's great," I say, "but that really doesn't apply to me...it's May 27." Ah. But wait! Since there were so many problems reported with those initial 360s, Microsoft offered a grace period of 10 days to customers on top of the 2 months! May 18th and salvation! Now we were getting somewhere, I thought. I'd just read on the Xbox 360 Fanboy site that one of their major contributor's 360 had died, but that "by the good graces of Microsoft" they'd replaced it. Well, I was ready for those same "good graces"--I'd bought extra wireless controllers, the recharging kit, the batteries, the wireless network adapter, the games (Arcade and otherwise). I'd told all the nay-sayers, all the die-hard PlayStation 2 fans, that the 360 was a platform that had so much potential and was worth the money. ***, my best friend even bought one on my recommendation, and doesn't even touch his PlayStation anymore. I thought I'd earned some "good graces."

But, of course, I hadn't. They then proceeded to tell me that they had nothing for me. This was, after all, May 27. So, even though I'm pretty much convinced I've got one of the initially buggy 360s (one of support supervisors told me I had a perfectly fine Xbox360 while the blinking lights of death flashed over my shoulder) I've got nothing to show for it. I couldn't even get the xbox live people to give me a break on the 12+1 month subscription card that I'd bought (stupidly thinking my state-of-the-art "next-gen" gaming console would actually last a year!) while I scraped together the money ($130) to send my dead 360 off for repairs. Their advice? Get some more money. Failing that, get a friend to let me use their 360. How helpful.

Sour grapes? Perhaps. Bellyaching? Sure. I missed the cutoff date, boo hoo. In the end, though, customer loyalty is earned--or should be, at least--by a company's loyalty to its customer.

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I've not seen the 'red lights of death' myself, but UNO has crashed my console twice. Both times, apparently, caused by someone leaving a live game immediately after the round started. (before the first player even had time to play a card.)

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i dont get the red lights either, but it freezes during alot of games. Mostly EA games and Oblivion.

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Nope, no problems so far. But I don't think that I own a 360 from the first batch. I received my console at around Christmas.

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Well, I got a two year warranty with my 360. So, when mine broke a couple months back I didn't have to pay anything to get it replaced. You should've got the extended warranty considering it is a brand new system and is likely to have bugs. It only cost an extra $60.00 for the 2 year warranty. But, yeah, that sucks for you.

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My 360 kicked it last week. At first it just started freezing up more and more, and then it started freezing on startup xbox logo. Then it happened, the red circle of death and no image came on the screen. I called them up and my system was out of warranty, but it fell into the 10day "grace period." They are sending a box to put the xbox in, and I am supposed to take it to a UPS store. They said I should get it back in 3-4 weeks (I almost choked).

I am out of school for the summer, and now I have sometime to play, but the gaming gods decided to play mean. Now I have no console for upwards of a month. If my system died one week later, the microsoft crew said it would cost ~$130 for them to fix it.

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I just got off the phone with Customer Service a couple hours ago, I picked up my first Xbox 360 around 4-14-06 it started freezing up a few days later so I had to ship it in. I recieved another console about 10-12 days later, a launch console with a manufacture date of 10-24-05, last night it started freezing so i'm sending it in. I spoke with a Supervisor and got overnight shipping for everything(box to me, xbox to them, xbox back to me). It was also still covered under warranty, thankfully, since i've been laid off for about 2 weeks and am just going back to work after the holiday. Should have asked for some free games :)

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Do USA xbox360's only come with 90 days warranty, thats terrible - standard consumer electronic items are almost always a minimum of 1 year.

I can guess that probably 50%+ or so of these defects may be blamed on improper use, people are pretty daft - Putting their 360's in poorly ventilated places, not using UPS or Surge Protectors, pulling leads in/out while turned on, overloading power sockets or just not handling their 360's carefully etc...

I have a 360 running in my non-air-con living room in Thailand at 37 degrees celicius ambient temperature and the xbox has been faultless, its a Japanese one though so maybe its built in a different place.

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I've seen the red lights of death myself.
I murdered them.
I just unplugged all of my cables and replugged them back in and my console was normal.

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Sorry to bust your bubble on the whole "1 Year" thing, but that is completely unaccurate. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consoles here in the states have a 90 day warranty. Now controllers and stuff(Accessories) may be more or less. I'm CS at BestBuy, and too many people pass up on protection because they think "nothing will happen" Mine broke once already also, I got the MS plan and the BBY plan.

400+ dollars is way to much money to be throwing in the air hoping the best for it, no matter how you look at it.

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I got hit with the ring of fire 2 days ago. I called support and they were very helpful unlike the ps2 support staff lol. But its a 6 month warranty which is kinda cheap so i will be paying my 30 bucks a year to cover my 360. But yeah i use my 360 a lot its on almost everyday doing something.

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Hmm. I just opened my xbox box to look at what warrenty I have, and apparently, my system came with 3 month warrenty. I have owned the system since november and still have no problems with it.

Im a little dissapointed because every product has 1-3 year warrenty standard, and I assumed my xbox had that. Turns out I needed to call some my xbox number and ask them about a 2-year warrenty plan. Thats just Bs. This is a home video game console. MY console has been sitting in the samespot, un disturbed since november. If It where to break, it would be complete BS that I need to pay to fix it, or pay for extended warrenty to fix it. When I buy a product, I expect it to last my whole life if I never even move it. Hopefully my xbox does not die for at least 4-5 years. At least if it dies then, I can just throw it away and go buy a new one of ebay for cheap.

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The first time it had ever screwed up since launch was about two weeks ago (the day my finals ended). It was freezing like crazy at the boot screen, then it just refused to turn on. I sent it in and got a new unit, lets hope this one works for more than 6 months. Extend your warranties is all i can say.

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Zachary said that his new one has a manufacture date of 10-24-05, anyone know where I can find that on my system?

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I think it a absurd that people go through more than a couple consoles. 1 or 2 I can understand. They could be faulty but once you get into the 4 and 5 range than it is obviously your problem and not the xbox. Is it really that hard to keep your 360 in a ventilated place as well as your power source. I have had my 360 since before launch(thanx mountain dew) and have had the same console with very few problems, only a few freezes which happens to any console. Give Microsoft a break and do them a favor and take care of your xbox.

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I got the red ring of death bout a week ago. Console kept freezing during the Lost Planet demo and during Call of Duty 2 online play. Next day walke dinto an EB Games and they hot swapped it with one right of the box.

My brother-in-law is also getting the rings of death on his console. Both of our consoles were launch systems.

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I've had my console replaced 3 times due to various reasons, so I'm now on my 4th. On one occasion, my xbox 360 was scratching discs and broke my Call of Duty 2 (the console wasn't moved during use or nothing like that)
We spent hours on the phone with Microsoft, they said the disc scratching wasn't our fault, they wouldn't extend our Xbox Live subscription whilst our Xbox spent all the time away to get fixed/replaced.
Eventually they told us they'd get the line manager to speak to us. A week later we asked when we'd be able to that - they said in 6-8 weeks time. It's now months later. No word from Microsoft from anyone. However, I accidentally received 2 consoles. I live in N.Ireland. One box said UK on it, the other said Ireland on and was a Core console and I received that 15 minutes after the doorbell rung for the first one - so I think I'll forget about those scratched CD's then....

Other problems I had with broken Xbox 360's were very frequent crashes, dodgy DVD playback etc.
Now my Xbox is crash-free (extremely rare now) and the graphics actually seem slightly improved.

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I have a launch 360. I've had it freeze twice on load screens in Oblivion. And it froze once in Hardwood Hearts. But the Hearts one, at least, was a software issue that they fixed via patch. I bet the Oblivion one is a software issue, too, seeing as how both times it's happened on load screens.

Of course, it makes sense that I haven't had any problems. I bought the two-year warranty. Doesn't it just figure?

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My 360 started freezing up during gameplay after 15 minutes a few weeks ago. Rebooting made it work again for another 15 minutes. Then it stopped altogether. I think the cooling on the GPU is fried because it leaves artifacts all over the screen. Mine is a PAL launch system.

Credit to M$ and UPS, they have been *very* hot on this and offered me all kinds of options for replacements and fixing, aside from the standard service. They were also very friendly (if somewhat, er, Italian) at the call-center. Its being picked up by UPS on Tuesday and I should have it back within five working days.

My Macbook Pro should arrive around the same time :)

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I had a system since lauch and I have never got the "ring of death" it froze about 3 times though mostly from playing madden but everything else works fine though..however I havent been on xbox live yet

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