xbox rrod...

I have to vent for a sec, and am wondering if anyone else has experienced this..

So, my 360 Elite died last night. Its displayed the RRoD several times in the past, but I would just unplug it, plug it back up, power it on, and everything would be fine. It wont do that this time.

So, disappointed, I went to the Xbox Support site. It suggests that I register my Xbox and submit an online repair request. It then asks me to log in with my Live account, so I throw in my credentials, and am then redirected to a blank page. I thought well, maybe its just that I'm not in IE, because I'm sure we all know how picky Microsoft is about thier stuff. So I try it in IE, same thing. Tried it from my Mac in Safari and FF, same thing.

Next, phone support. I went through the steps pressing buttons to talk to the automated crap, select the options dealing with the 360, and the rrod, etc. It proceeds to tell me that I need to go to the web site, then says "That's all the information I have on this topic. *click* ". Cursing begins.

Next, email support. I fill out the form, start typing out a full description of what happened, how it happened, etc. On this form, there is a text area that you are obviously typing in. Well, under this text area, there is a counter, showing you how many characters, of the available 1000 you have used. Shown as xxx/1000. It shows you that you can have up to 1000 characters on the counter. So I type it all up, hit submit, and it throws back an error, that the message is too long that it must be less than 500 characters. More cursing. Why have a 1000 character counter, if the actual limit is 500 characters?

I had an email reply this morning when I got up, the support person was complaining that they need more information, that I didn't give enough info. I had a 500 character limit, ***. I didn't have enough available space to tell you everything you wanted to know.



Microsoft, I truly hate you. Your ability to thoroughly irritate me, far exceeds anything else I've ever encountered.

That's really unfortunate. I was one of the lucky souls that waited outside in the cold for one of the first xbox's in '05. I got one, and then it died a year later. I went through all the rigmarole that you did, but in my case everything went smoothly. Either Microsoft has drastically changed their xbox support since then, or you just got completely shafted. It took me about an hour to get everything submitted online. The next week I had a box with packaging instructions with prepaid shipping to Microsoft's xbox repair center. Two weeks later, I had a brand new xbox.

I hope you get everything worked out. It could have been that you were trying to deal with this stuff on a heavy traffic day for Microsoft, or maybe they had some servers go down. Either way, Microsoft has been really good about fixing the xbox's that have been plagued by the red ring of death. I don't despise Microsoft as much as some people do, but I have been PO'd by MS many times too. I'm sure it will all work out for you in the end. Maybe you'll get lucky like I did and get a brand new console

Try wrapping your console in a bath towel and run it for about 30 to 45 minutes, letting it roast during that time. My buddy did this with his 360 whenever the RROD issue would surface and after doing this trick upon the next reboot the console would work fine, for a few days anyways. That trick worked for about two months before his 360 finally gave up the ghost.