The Red Ring of Death

It started to show itself Thursday night during our weekly Rock Band world tour. I had gone off to swing dancing for the evening, but the remaining guys kept playing. They tell me that they were just about to earn a tour jet for our band when my Xbox 360 froze. Assuming that it was just overheated, they shut if off and called it an evening. I fired up my Xbox this morning wanting to work on my drumming skills, when I saw this:



That's right, the dreaded Red Ring of Death!!! I got online to see what I could do. Going to the Xbox website, I entered the serial number to register it (I thought I had done this a year ago when I bought it, but oh well). After registering, I clicked on the "check warranty status", and much to my horror, it said that it was out of warranty as of March 21, 2008... Today is March 29, 2008... I missed it by 8 days?!? Oh, good grief.

Just then I remembered reading that Microsoft had added a 2 or 3 year warranty coving specifically the Red Ring of Death (just not in those words). Determined to get my machine working again, I called the helpline, and it sounds like it won't cost me a dime to get it fixed. They're sending me a box with pre-paid postage to mail it back in, and I should have it back in 2-3 weeks. I'm secretly hoping that they won't be able to fix it, and they'll just decide to me a new one, hopefully one with an HDMI connection on the back (since I bought mine about a month before that option was available). Either way, it looks like I'll have to get one of my band mates to bring his Xbox over so that we can continue our tour.