Red Ring of Death. It’s perhaps one of the most devastating phrases for a gamer, well a gamer that plays Xbox anyway. I brought my 360 last July and haven’t looked back since. At the time I’d heard of the problems that Microsoft had with the 360, but had always thought mine would be OK; little did I know!
This Thursday night, after a long day at work, I had decided to try and get more than a few more hours in to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I’d had a few problems with the machine the previous Saturday, but I’d put that down to playing non stop without a break and the heat generated from our PVR. When the three red lights of the apocalypse had appeared on that Saturday, I left it for a couple of hours to cool down and then managed to get a further two hours play in. I honestly thought I’d escaped and thought nothing more of it.
There are various reports of what actually causes the ring of death. The definition from Microsoft is a “general hardware failure”, which is helpful. Looking back, I was actually warned of the impending doom a few days before.
From Wikipedia
When a Microsoft Xbox 360 console experiences a “general hardware” failure or “Core Digital” failure, three flashing red lights appear (known as the “Red Ring of Death”) around the power button, in lieu of the four green lights indicating normal operation. Warning signs may include freeze-ups, in which the screen has strange, spontaneous graphical problems in the middle of gameplay, such as checkerboard or pinstripe patterns on the screen, the sound is frozen and changed to a strange, static-like sound, and the console only responds to pressing the power button to turn it off.
The console may also say that the disc is unreadable, this may also arise from issues with the consoles power supply. These events may happen once or several times until the general hardware failure occurs, when the user attempts to turn the console on, and the three red lights are seen and the console will not function.
That’s exactly what happened when I started my marathon session of SW:TFU on Friday evening.
After a quick peek in to Microsoft’s support site made it quite clear what I needed to do to arrange a repair. Microsoft have done the decent thing and actually extended warranty on machines they think could be affected to three years, so once I had registered the machine I was sent an email with a packing slip and then told that UPS would be delivering an empty box within 3 working days.
All this has come at a time when a few of the biggest games of the year are out, so I’m hoping that the process runs pretty smoothly from now on. I will, of course, keep you updated on what is happening as my Xbox embarks on it’s journey to Germany and back. Microsoft quote 1-3 working weeks from the time it’s collected by UPS, let’s see, shall we?
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