The Red Ring of Death - something they say you never want to see happen to your XBox 360.
The story began a few days ago when Alicia and I had decided to order the new Guitar Hero World Tour game for Christmas along with two guitar controllers. We got the delivery today, intending to wait and open it at Christmas. But hey, you have to open it up to make sure it's all there, right? Then you certainly need to put in the game to make sure it is okay, don't you? Of course...
I was hooking up the two guitar controllers tonight when the machine got angry (cars hate Alicia, apparently video game consoles don't care for me). The three red rings for 'hardware failure' began to flash on the machine and the thing would never work again.
The ominous failure is a problem in the console hardware that has happened to many of the original systems. I was afraid it would happen to ours sooner than later. Last year Microsoft recognized that the problem was happening to a large number of XBox 360 consoles.
This means shipping the entire console back to Microsoft. Luckily there is no charge for the repair, and they send you packing materials and a free shipping label. Of course you're without your system for about three weeks while they repair it...
I arranged for the repair online and solemnly packed the Guitar Hero stuff back up to try again in a few weeks. I suppose it was a good thing that we opened that present early though. If we had waited, the machine probably wouldn't have died until Christmas day. Who says it's not a good idea to be impatient?
No comments:
Post a Comment