Xbox 360 R.I.P.

So it has hit me too. The wave of Xbox360 failures … or actually it hit my 360 ;-) If you’ve followed my Jaiku feed you have probably noticed my rambling about that box over the last week or so (basically since I returned from my trip to the Czech Republic and Germany).


And after a call with Microsoft Support on Monday, someone from UPS came the day after to take my little Xbox360 away from me on a long trip to the place where all … heck, that might even be true. Just think about it! Over the last months I’ve heard tons of horror stories about the infamous “Red Ring of Death” and these stories escalated even into MS changing their support service for this single problem. I always thought, it wouldn’t happen to me since my Xbox360 actually worked really fine. Sure, I had a crash or two every now and then, but nothing really persistent.

I guess I should have not felt as safe after all. It was just strange the that Red Ring didn’t even hit me. I think I saw one right after I called MS, but before that it was all just stupid freezing with no error message or error-light at all. Last Saturday I got myself “Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions” and would have quite enjoyed playing it for a while. But only 10 minutes after I started the game, the box froze. Then another one and that was it for the day. Then I could play for about 2 hours without noticing a single problem.

So on Sunday I was hoping just a little bit, that my Xbox360 was working again just fine (wishfully forgetting the number of crashes that happened on Friday, Thursday, …) and started playing again. It lasted for 5 minutes, 10 minuntes and ten minutes. I guess this was the time I gave up.

I already mentioned the crashes from last week. There I already read the knowledgebase article of MS’ support page about this problem and tried it with and without HDD, with and without playing a game from DVD. It absolutely made no difference. A couple of times I couldn’t even boot the console completely. It froze right while showing the logo ;-) And given that it got worse from day to day I somehow doubt that it was a software problem :-(

Now all I can do is wait for my console to return (hopefully completely repaired) from MS (I think in Germany) and hopefully this will happen soon :-) Can’t wait for playing Viva Pinata again and getting my hands on titles like Bio Shock and Halo 3 ;-)