Jonathan Cusick

Last week my Xbox 360 was hit by the wide spread problem of hardware failure which has been dubbed as ‘the red ring of death’. For those who don’t know this is a common problem which seems to affect a wide range of Xbox 360 consoles and has even been featured on the BBC’s Watchdog program in February this year.

The first thing that crossed my mind when this happened apart from the initial annoyance the problem caused was how much it would cost to get repaired as it has just passed the twelve month warranty period. My first line of enquiry was to drop David an e-mail as he had the same problem about a month ago. David was quick to reply with some good news and some bad news the good news was that Microsoft are now fixing the red ring of death problem for free or by replacing your machine if it cannot be fixed. This brings us on to the bad news, I called the number provided by David to find out how to ship my 360 to Microsoft and they promptly sent a UPS delivery guy to pick the console up last Monday (12/11/07) which was good but it will take three weeks for the console to be fixed or replaced and means missing out on nearly a month of my Xbox live subscription and missing out on the free arcade game offer…not cool.

However the good news certainly does outweigh the bad as when the red ring of death problem was first reported it all the repairs and shipping had to be paid for. This also means that now I can get back to playing my Wii console which I did not take with me to Bolton so this means that now I can finally complete The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which I have had for nearly a year now and it is a fantastic game so I look forward to seeing how its plot unfolds.