Xbox 360 Dead

Not a good good day for gamers here yesterday as the Xbox 360 failed. I stayed up lat on Wednesday night playing and everything was fine when I headed off to bed. When we powered up the Xbox 360 system on Thursday morning it froze in a checkerboard pattern after playing for a few minutes. This repeated itself everytime we tried to play a game.

Then, Thursday night it wouldnt even power up. We would just get three fourths of the ring of light coming up Red. Searching the Microsoft support pages, it didnt sound good. The articles indicated that this meant hardware failure. I went through several of the steps to try to remedy it, but none worked.

The last step was to call Microsoft support. This morning, we placed the call and got a nice, friendly representative who took care of us. Basically, we are sending them the broke Xbox 360 and they are sending us a new one. This despite the fact that my box was considerably outside the warranty period since it was a launch Xbox 360. The rep just said they would cover it as if it was a warranty. I think they are still trying to win folks over before the PS3 launch later this year. Whatever the reason, they did good by me.
I am not sure what happened, but during the night on Wednesday, we had some pretty good thunderstorms and the power went off and on here several times. I have my Xbox 360 on a surge protector, so I dont know if it was the storm or not. It may have just been its time or been overused by me and Sean.

The new Xbox 360 should be here in about a week, so not much gaming until then.