XBox360 Trials and Tribulations

So after 6 months of smooth gaming with the XBox 360, my voyage has hit a bump which feels more like a brick wall. I bought the XBox360 as a family present for this past Christmas. Now I've heard about all the problems the XBox360 had with the Red Rings of Death (RRoD) and other problems that plagued the console since its release. But compared to the Sony Playstation3, the XBox360 was much more economical and has a better game selection. Plus since I was able to get it 3 months before Christmas on my credit line with Dell, it was a fairly easy purchase.

So off we went for a smooth 6 month gaming tour, when the weather started getting rough (Boy that sounds familiar, LOL). My XBox360 stopped loading entirely. It generated an E73 error message which (from my research online) meant it was a hardware malfunction, probably from the ethernet connector. I figured that with 6 months of usage, 3 months of being put away after buying the console and who knows how long it stood in Dell's warehouse maybe the malfunction had more to do with time. So I send the console in for repairs on June 26th and to my pleasant surprise I got it back on July 9th, a little less than 2 weeks. And off we go on our gaming voyage...or so I thought.

My son was playing a game on July 10th (Mind you, the day after I receive the console from repairs), the pesky multilanguage error message which reads "To play this disc, put it in an Xbox 360 console" pops up. Once I got home from work, I checked the console out and saw that it would play no games whatsoever. It wouldn't play DVD's. CD's or even the disc drive cleaning disc. It would just read and say open disc. I go through all the online troubleshooting suggestions to no avail. I call customer support.

After going through the lengthy automated B.S., I get a live person on the line who walks me through the same steps as I had done earlier. As we proceeded through the steps, I could feel my blood pressure rising since I knew what was coming next: I would have to send the console in for repair...AGAIN!!!! To make matters worse, as I rant about how unacceptable and irresponsible that my having to return a repaired item 2 days after it was received the call was disconnected. If I was using my Blackberry, the phone would have gone through the wall.

So I call again getting a live person in a faster amount of time and I guess the prior customer agent updated the computer information as to my call. The agent walked on eggshells as he spoke to me but told me as the last agent that I would have to send it. That the last repair may not have been done completely due to a "Misunderstanding" whatever that means. LOL. By sending it in, it would have a Primary status for a full and complete inspection...Umm, shouldn't they do that anyway? So I resigned myself to the fact that I had two choices: Send it back or throw it out the window. I was seriously tempted to let the XBox360 fly but the kids would have been upset. So here I am riding my favorite Filly: Iron Horse#6 trying to get to the UPS Store on 91st Street and 3rd Avenue by 3:30pm to catch the last pickup for the weekend. What a charmed life I lead!!!

BTW, they don't pick up UPS Ground shipping packages on Saturday so the box will sit at the store until Monday. There goes the rest of my Saturday. LOL. All I can do is laugh, right?