RRoD

Red Ring of Death+2

Another one bites the dust.

At first, I thought The Simpsons Game was just glitching when Lisa blew a Saxophone attack and Marge was coming back to health. Then, it froze again on another big, loud event a minute after I started playing again. That was an exploding car. The third time happened about 10 seconds after I fired it up. The fourth power on was greeted with the Red Ring of Death.

Apparently this animal is not in danger of extinction.

Now, the current system was *manufactured* on 2007-08-23, therefore it has the older 90nm Zephyr chipset. It was the replacement for my first Red-ringed 360 last Fall. I have no idea what will be sent back this time, so tomorrow, I am going out to buy a Xbox 360 Arcade system. No, I am not playing GTA IV, I am playing The Simpsons Game (the one that revolves around Marge’s quest against an Itchy and Scratchy game of the same genre šŸ˜‰ ) and Army of Two (with Ed) at the moment, but I am not waiting 3-4 weeks for a replacement given I use mine as a Media Center Extender and unlike last time, there are new shows being recorded that need watching in the living room. (Nice run-on dude.) This is especially true given the long hours I have been putting in at work. Never home in time to catch them live. In fact, my plan to be home for Lost this week was thwarted by a migraine and the need to take a nap when I did get home *early* at 8.00.

Anyway, back to the Arcade box… it will should have an HDMI port and the newer 65nm Falcon chip. Possibly a quieter DVD drive too. This can be had for $280 and I am happy to pick one up since I already have a hard drive. Whatever they send back will become a second Media Center Extender in the bedroom (and as a backup for when someone else has theirs Red Ring and can borrow as a loaner). This actually might be a win-win except for the fact that it died right at 10.00 tonight so that I am out of luck until tomorrow. Hey, at least it got me blogging tonight…

Going thru this experience a second time makes you wonder why… I mean, the first time was forgivable, but you’d think they’d send you back something that wouldn’t break again. Hopefully the newer Falcon boxes are really in the 5% failure window whereas it seems the original Zephyr boxes are something around the 33% failure rate being reported. For shame on Microsoft, but they still have my love because the PS3 doesn’t have a Gamerscore and I needs my points and point of comparison with my peeps.

At least they got the process of getting a replacement request in a lot easier than last time. You might remember it was all kinds of screwed up my first time thru. In fact, I get a decent amount of hits here about the phone issue with registration and the “No pending repair” message that shows on the site when your replacement is on its way to you. Wonder if it will still do that when it comes time. I guess I’ll wait and see, but it will be while playing my new Arcade box over HDMI. By that time I might actually be rocking GTA IV, we’ll see.

As a side note, earlier in the week I finished off Assassin’s Creed for the full 1000 achievement points. That felt pretty good and it is a little odd that both games — Crackdown being the other — I finished in full required finding numerous hard-to-find items in large-ish worlds. Of course, I *cheated* and printed off maps to do it, but you still have to check and double-check them all. (At a certain point you are forced to do it just to do it.) In all, a great game. Not sure I will write up a full post about it or not. Probably not, but we’ll see…

Oh, that RRoD image is actually mine. I decided to take a shot of it for posterity. I’m sure it is the last one I’ll see for myself…