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.
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FOAF who works at MS says:
1. the earlier revisions were engineered from simulation without a lot of empirical verification that things were behaving as expected. Manufacturer’s specs were off enough that there were too many problems and not enough time to fix them.
2. your new unit is lighter because it’s missing a couple heat sinks that you don’t need after having competent EEs do their thing with it.
My xbox died last October or November, shortly before they extended the warranty to one year. A few months later, I magically got a refund check from Microsoft. So that’s pretty much how it happens.
I got a replacement unit, too. I don’t think it’s any quieter or lighter, but this one no longer scratches up discs, either.
One bad thing about the replacement units — any XBLA content you bought will now only work with your original account, while logged in to xbox live. This may not be an issue, but for me means that the girlfriend can’t play the unlocked games with her account.
I just sent my Xbox 360 off for warranty repair due to the Red Ring of Death. About how long did yours take?
Just over a month. That straddled the press release — so giving them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps their repair pipeline was in disarray retooling for the big announcement.