Tuesday, September 16, 2008

My Xbox died

While watching an episode of Seinfeld at lunch yesterday, my Xbox 360 froze and then started flashing the dreaded "Red Ring of Death."

I've only had it since January. So, while it is under warranty and Microsoft will be fixing it for free, that's pretty poor product performance (alliteration unintended). My friend Sean had to send his in this summer, and I think Brendan recently did as well, if I remember correctly, which points to something crappy going on in that box. While I appreciate Microsoft stepping up and fixing it, I wish it had been better designed in the first place. Especially if I bought it new in January! I know they were aware of the problems before then, so why didn't my Xbox have new internals that avoided the problem?

Fortunately I'm not knee-deep in a game at the moment, and we have another DVD player, but if this had happened a few weeks ago when Castle Crashers came out, I'd be pretty mad. My customer service rep "Jason" said they'd be giving me a free month of Live Gold, but after I hung up, I began to think I deserved more. You can get a year's worth of Live Gold for $40 on Amazon, so a month is worth $3.33. I paid $350 for this thing (and now the 60GB version sells for $300, as opposed to my 20GB), and it doesn't even last a year? That's crap, man.

**edit**

Forgot to mention: instead of sending a pre-paid box to ship the console, they're only emailing me a pre-paid label. Everyone else I've talked to has gotten a box. I have to box it up myself. What gives?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, I got the RROD after the earthquake. Man, that sucks. I'm surprised you didn't get one of the new improved models if you bought it this year. I will say I was very impressed with the turnaround time. It took a couple days for the box to get there and then a couple days for it to arrive at Microsoft. Once they received it I had my xbox in a couple more days. It took a little over a week with weekends figured in.

Ryan said...

That's encouraging to hear. But, as I added above, I have to get my own box for it. Kind of a dumb new policy. I guess theoretically it'll be faster, since I don't have to wait for a box to arrive, but I didn't even get the email with the label today, so who knows how much time it will actually save.

Unknown said...

That's a bummer. I did the whole thing online. I never even had to talk to someone. I'm antisocial like that.