my date with the rrod...

although a hardcore gamer i am not, (i lack the hand-eye coordination gamer gene that is inherited by our children's generation), i have come to know and love my xbox 360. purchased about 2 years ago, it was, and still is, the centerpiece of my downtime world. i have spent many a night after hours, plugging away at guitar hero, halo, call of duty, tiger woods, and mlb2k. i have even shown flashes of mediocrity at times while gaming online against the masses in multiplayer mode. as anyone who games at all knows the dreaded three flashing quadrants of red light means the end of gaming on your xbox, at least for awhile. i had this strike me this past friday night at a most inopportune time. i had just purchased a game for my son for his birthday and he had been begging me all night to play it. we finally had a chance just before his bedtime when the dreaded "red rings of death" reared it's ugly head. as unfortunate as this was, i couldn't help but wish this had happened to me, and not him. of course this gave me a prime teaching moment where i got to tell him that adversity builds character, blah, blah, blah. at any rate, my beloved box is en route to the texas "repair center", which my research suggests it will be replaced by a refurb, rather than repaired. all the same to me as long as this next one is fixed. the "rrod" issue has been a pain in the butt for microsoft and they have spent over a billion dollars, offering 3 year warranty extensions on anyone who has the general hardware fault. this has proved to be a LOT of folks. amongst my friends who own xboxes the failure rate is about 60%. the console is known to generate a lot of heat and it seems ms skimped on some heat sinks which cause the motherboard to warp over time, thus causing the ultimate failure. as someone who works in technology i can tell you that electronics can and do fail all of the time. it's never a pleasant experience, especially when it happens to you. that said, i am willing to accept this and assume all will be made right, and that hopefully i will get back a unit with the proper heat sinks, gpu, and better cooling system in place and be gaming again in a couple of weeks. if it happens a second time i may not be as forgiving.