Mu: Catharsis

I'm inclined to believe that MSFT is misrepresenting the high failure rate of the Xbox 360. This based on the fact that I am now sending mine back for the second time.

The first time was the Red Ring Of Death. This was occurring from time to time when the machine was started cold. It would often correct it's self if left running for awhile and then restarted. However, once this behavior started, games started freezing randomly.

My initial machine was replaced with a different (new? refurb?) unit back in July. I had to go through the pain of transferring all my content licenses (an epic pain given that there are two of us who have been buying content for the machine).

A few weeks ago, my roommate informed me that the machine was starting to make a horrible grinding noise regardless of the presence of a disk. To me it sounds a lot like a broken fan, or perhaps a loose bit of wire interfering with a fan. In either case, I'll be damned if I'm going to open the box myself and try to figure it out... So, with two weeks remaining on my 'extended' warranty, I'm RMAing the machine again...

I phoned them to let them know how annoyed I was, which was entirely fruitless. The person on the other end of the line hardly spoke English, and was too polite to get upset with. He 'documented my requests' to expedite the repair, and wished me a good day.

From the link above, it seems my best hope is that they send me a newer 'Jasper' model. I suppose it would also be nice if they reset the 'once per year' restriction on the self-service, license transfer tool. Otherwise I'm going to need to call them again when I get the new unit -- ugh.

The funniest part is, this was all foretold to me by the guy at the UPS store. When I brought the Xbox in for the first time, he said 'I normally see people at least twice for these' :(
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