Xbox 360 °F

For those following along at home, my Xbox 360 Died The Death about a month ago and I shipped it off to Microsoft for repair service. When I sent it they had not yet announced the repair program, so they billed me $70.

A package with an Xbox 360 arrived yesterday. I don’t know how they plan to refund my money, but hopefully it will just magically happen. Anyway, there are a few things worth discussing in terms of the machine that came back.

• It came with a nice letter explaining that instead of repairing my old unit, they just sent me a new one, and they apologize for the trouble.
• Interestingly, the new unit feels much lighter than the old one. I can’t tell if this is my imagination or not. If it’s real, I approve of this change. If I am imagining it, I approve of my imagination.
• The new unit’s DVD drive is quieter (although still not “quiet”).
• There’s much less heat coming from the unit when playing (the surface gets hot, but it’s not actively radiating, whereas with my old unit we were in serious pottery kiln territory, to the point where I always left my cabinet open when playing for fear of burning down my house).
• The new unit has a different serial number, but all the paperwork was done in advance, so purchased games still worked, the warranty was transferred over, etc.
• The only ‘work’ necessary was that I had to resync the controllers after turning the box on.
• They also included a gift card good for 1 month of Xbox Live.

The moral of this story is that those of you who have an original heavy-and- hot Xbox 360 should probably hope that it fails with the red ring of death so you can score one of these nice new units.

Update: Here’s a nice copy of the letter they sent with the unit. Click to enlarge.

[](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp- content/uploads/2007/07/xbox_360_repair_letter_1024.jpg “Xbox letter” )