Red Ring of Death Strikes
You’d think something you don’t play that often (any more) would be immune to hardware defects that are usually a result of over heating or extreme usage… but that’s not the case! Last night I got the dreaded Red Ring of Death on my Xbox 360.
I immediately logged into the Xbox support site to submit a fix request, but found that it listed my console as ‘out of warranty’ despite Microsoft announcing a 3-year extension to the manufacturer’s warranty (due to the widespread Red Ring of Death problems.) This lead me to try to call in, but between having to go through an automated tech support tree, then on hold to talk to an ‘agent’ (with REALLY loud on-hold music, by the way), I gave up and decided to contact Microsoft by email.
This morning, after talking with Mike who also got the RRoD recently, I decided to log back in to the support site. Not sure if it was a tired oversight, but the fix request form had explicit instruction on what to do about the RRoD and that it was, indeed, covered for free. Not sure how I missed that last night, but in all fairness it was below the fold on the bottom of the page. Easy to miss, I guess… or at least that is what I am telling myself! SO, with that said, I submitted a fix request. Very easy to do and the whole process was easy. I should be receiving a postage-paid box to ship my system back for fixes in the next few days.
Amusingly enough, I did receive an email response to last night’s contact. Unfortunately it was a super generic email response from someone named ‘Zen’ at Support Services. It was very tech support heavy, despite explicitly asking about how to get my system fixed under the warranty and mentioning that I already followed the tech support protocol for testing and verifying my system as having the RRoD. It would have been very frustrating to receive this had I not did what I did this AM, as the email asked me to call the support line. So, that is one area of improvement for Microsoft.
So, I should have my system fixed for free (thanks Microsoft, very classy) and back just in time for the dashboard update in mid November. I’ll update with additional experiences, but so far it has been pretty pain free, despite the minor hiccup last night. Stay tuned!
