Monday, April 27, 2009

R.I.P. Xbox 360 #2


This past weekend I was out of town for a cousin's wedding, but the night before I left, tragedy struck my dorm room: the dreaded Red Ring of Death had claimed its second casualty under my ownership. As tragic as it is for any Red Ring of Death to appear, this one was especially discouraging.

First of all, the "RRoD" had been kind of out of sight, out of mind since Microsoft had apparently fixed the problem last year. The problem is, my original 360 (a launch-window system) died, and was therefore replaced, well before the solution was solved and the media attention died down. Because of this, I hadn't really been expecting it to pop up at any time so this one really caught me by suprise.

In addition, despite Microsoft's 3-year extended warranty to Red Ring casualties, my own 3-year extended warranty expired on March 1 (less that 2 months prior to this incident). Therefore, I am technically out of warranty and will likely be required to pay a $100 repair fee to get my console fixed. Considering my contributions to the company (being an early adopter, purchasing an enormous number of games, and being single-handedly responsible for the purchase of at least 6 other Xbox 360's by some of my friends), combined with my current economic situation (broke, unemployed, college student, and generally poor economic conditions), I hope to plead my case to Microsoft Customer Service later this afternoon and hopefully get it repaired for free. I will post the results on my blog after the fact, but in the meantime I am still saddened (moved on from anger) at the loss of yet another beloved system. And yes, I am a nerd, get over it.

[Note: The picture above is an actual picture of the weekend's casualty, a.k.a. my own Xbox. I also broke the USB port cover flap when removing it from the broken console :\ ]

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