My love/hate relationship with the Xbox 360

For my last birthday Jamie and Steve got me a nice Xbox 360 and all was well. I enjoyed the hell out of it and played many a game, probably a bit too many in Jamie’s eyes, but nonetheless I throughly enjoyed her present.

I think I enjoyed it a bit too much infact. Because about 3 weeks ago I got the lovely Red Rings of Death on my 360. Guess I played it a bit too much and the cpu and gpu chips decided to de-solder themselves from the motherboard as it warped.

“Great,” I thought to myself, but I figured that it wouldn’t be that bad because Microsoft said that all consoles were covered for 3 years because of the RRoD so that meant every console that has been sold for the entire 360’s lifetime in the US is still covered. Which is good because Jamie bought my console used.

I phoned up MS and informed the Russian-sounding fellow about my plight and he said he’d get a “coffin” mailed out to me as soon as possible so I could get my console fixed. Sure enough the next day I got an email saying the box had shipped and gave me my tracking #.

Box comes and I immedietly package up my console to send back. I then get a note about a week later that my system is done being fixed and it’s coming back to me.

Joy of joys I thought as I watched the package go from Texas to my house in Florida.

It got here yesterday. Which was great because the Bioshock demo had just come out and everyone was raving about it, plus I wanted to play all the games I hadn’t been able to play while the system was broken.

I plugged everything in and sat down on the couch, gamepad in hand as I held down the power button.

Only to be greated by the RRoD again. It turns out that Microsoft hadn’t actually done anything with my console and it was still broken. I spoke with a support agent yesterday about my problem and asked if it was possible for Microsoft to send me a pre-paid label instead of a whole new box and packing supplies since I still had the box from when my console arrived yesterday. That wouldn’t work they said, security issues apparently. So he would get a new repair order started for my system and all would be well.

Except that the box didn’t get shipped out today like he had told me so now I’m sitting on the phone waiting for someone to pick up so I can figure out just wtf is going on since apparently if I try to check out my consoles status on the new and “wonderful” service.xbox.com it tells me there is an error and to call support.

Goddamn you Microsoft for making such a fucking awesome, yet fatally flawed system.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 7:57 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.