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My very first RRoD

by j_meyer_13

So, my Xbox 360 finally succumbed to the Red Ring of Death earlier tonight. I know, not a huge deal, everyone on the internet has had it happen to them at least 4 times... but this one is mine! It's a launch-era chipset (manufactured 2006-4-11 according to the sticker), and until now it's mostly worked fine. Sure, it's had the occasional lock-up on some games... and this really weird problem wh...

So, my Xbox 360 finally succumbed to the Red Ring of Death earlier tonight.  I know, not a huge deal, everyone on the internet has had it happen to them at least 4 times... but this one is mine! It's a launch-era chipset (manufactured 2006-4-11 according to the sticker), and until now it's mostly worked fine.  Sure, it's had the occasional lock-up on some games... and this really weird problem where it would lock up back home when it was connected to Live, but I'm pretty sure that's just because it would take forever to check if friends were playing a game (slow DSL is slooooooow).  And the disc drive was slowly failing.  And when I played GTA:IV a lot, the video would sometimes wig out and I'd have to restart it... But it never out-and-out failed... until tonight.  And it still works, actually... sort of.  I tried playing some Rock Band 2 (readers of the last blog entry know about my affection for that game) today, and it locked up on the Dashboard.  I figured, no big deal, just restarted it.  It went fine, played for a couple hours, until a friend came over.  We sat around talking for a while, while the Xbox was sitting on the Dashboard.  We went out to buy Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (and some basic foods) , got back, started playing it... it locked up again partway through the second mission.  I just turned it off then, since we were looking at apartments and furniture.  Another friend came over a bit later, sat down to start playing Halo 3: ODST, started loading a Firefight level, and it locked up again... turn it off, turn it back on, and we got this:   

 My very own RRoD!  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
After laughing at it for a while, I looked at the Xbox support site... turns out my warranty is expired, so I'm kind of screwed, as far as MS is concerned.  Sure, I could send it in and have them fix it for $150... or I could just spend another $50 and get an Arcade, since I already have a 120gb hard drive.  Would be nice to have an HDMI port, too (yeah, it's that old...)  So we decided that we would try to repair it, since one of the guys has some thermal paste and new heatsinks and whatnot from his recently-deceased Xbox.  And if that doesn't work... I guess I'm getting an Arcade.  Eventually...
 
It kinda sucks, but it's kinda funny... and to be honest, I am flat-out amazed it's taken this long to die.  I was fairly sure it was going to RRoD well over a year ago... and again when GTA:IV came out.  And ironically enough, I had sort-of been hoping it would happen, since I thought I would be able to just send it to MS and (hopefully) just get a replacement... but alas, that is not going to happen, it would seem.  Ah well... It's lasted me almost 3 years now (bought it June 2007, new, off of eBay), and done far better than I ever expected a launch-era chipset Xbox to do.  It shall be remembered fondly... assuming it doesn't rise from the dead.  XD