If it's under a year old you can take it back to the store you got it from, you're well within your rights to do so in the UK (and the retailer has to exchange it). If it's over a year old you're going to have to go through MS's repair policy. I did have a page somewhere where someone had compiled useful information, let me see if I can find it...

Edit: Success, here you go - http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=479165

Well, I bought it from play.com because that was the cheapest place at the time but I don't know if I can send it back there. I've had the console for about 10 months and I don't even play it that much, it's just one of those things I guess. Thanks for the link, though I'll probably end up giving Microsoft a call.

Play are a retailer just like anyone else, and they will have a returns policy. If in doubt hunt down a phone number for them and give them a ring. I very much doubt you'll be the first person to have bought a 360 from them that has red-ringed.

Ok, Thanks, Omagnus. I will give Play a ring and see what they say.

achievements give me a reason to stay for the next level. I guess it just motivates me. My Wii is sadly collecting dust :(

And the prize for "Thinly related, but ultimately pointless, post out of nowhere" goes to...

Anyways, on a 360 RRoD related note, I did spoke to a friend of mine who had bought from Play.com and got the dreaded red-ring, but he ended up taking it back to a highstreet store on a friend's receipt and getting it directly swapped over. It's appalling the number of people I know with 360s who have had at least one die on them, but more shocking that quite a few have had multiple die on them.

I've had two die on me. It isn't the end of the world, since Microsoft fixed them both quickly, and for free.

No, it isn't the end of the world, but it is incredibly annoying and really shit. I've on my third one these days, I think. My dad's on his third. I know two people on their forth machines, a bunch of people on second machines. Not the end of the world, no, but really very poor.

I'm only on my second system right now but I do agree it's amazing knowing how many systems some people have gone through. A friend I know through the internet is about to be on his fifth unless he gives up completely after this. My fiancé is on his fourth and it still gives him problems but it has been ok for about 4 months now. He had to replace the first 3 within the same span of time previously.

My system seems to be trucking along...only thing is in order for me to actually be able to play any disc without it freezing or being called unreadable, I have to boot the system to the dashboard, turn it off, boot it up again + open the disc tray. Then I have to let it sit for a minute before I close the tray and it'll let me play as long as I want with no problems. Otherwise it's guaranteed to screw up when I don't do that. Could be after 5 minutes or it could be after 10 but if I do all of that then I could play for 6 hours straight and it would be perfectly fine. My XBL buddies often sign on and then sign on again about a minute later before they start playing...I kind of wonder if they have to do the same shit I do.

Oh yeah and good fucking god do I wish I had enough MS points to buy Braid right now x.x

I am constantly worried about mine RRoDing on me, since I've had friends get it the same day they got it out of the box. But I think, considering how many long gaming sessions it's been put through, that I've got one of the ones that may hold out. I hope so, at least. I'd totally cry if it RRoDs once I get Saints Row 2 going on.

Mine got the RRoD and guess what?

I sent it to them for free, they sent it back to me for free and I got a month of free Xbox Live.

So you have to live without video games for two weeks. I mean, COME ON, the only person in the world that would affect would be Elixir.

First things first:

THE UNSPOKEN!!11[/Ozar Midrashim]

Got that out of the way...

I don't know, it's not about being cut off from video games so much as buying a product and expecting some kind of quality. I realize it's easy to go "lol, free replacement plan/ain't no thang" or something more intelligently put to that effect, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft put out a faulty product and to say that we should suck it up after plunking the hard earned dollar is truly irrelevant. I don't buy a stove so I can order take-out for 2 weeks when it eventually breaks down and I can't cook anymore or so I can rely on my not as good microwave (lol, Wii/PS3 analogue) to foot the bill.

I thought the internet as a whole was over the whole LOL 33% thing by now.

Is that the sound a point makes when it's completely and utterly wiped from existence?

The only thing that really sucked for me when my system died is that it died like..the moment I put GTA IV in for the first time and that was my most anticipated game at that point and it was all I wanted to play. I think I yelled at my system. And being out in Hawaii meant shipping took longer so I was without my system for a little over a month. The fixing/replacement only took like 2 days, just the shipping took forever. At least the process itself was really simple and the MS guy I spoke to on the phone was cool, and yeah, free XBL is always nice.

My Elite just died on me, and I called up customer support. Apparently they don't do repairs in Canada, only replacements. Can't complain there, I guess. I just have to pack it up and ship it out, which is apparently free too.

The guy on the line said my warranty just expired a few weeks ago, and was nice enough to set up the replacement anyway. Score.

While it sucks to not have the console for 2-3 weeks, [as I just picked up a couple new games,] I'm sure I'll live.

I'm sure #gfchat as a whole is over the whole LOL PEDO thing by now, right

RIGHT

I'm surprised mine lasted as long as it did. I got it on launch day, when Xboxes were crapping out left and right, and only last month did it finally get the RRoD. I'm just glad I got it back before Duke 3D and MM9 dropped. Only took a couple of weeks for them to send me a new one.

I wish it could've happened before they set up that system online where you transfer the licenses for everything you've downloaded to your new system, as opposed to calling them up and having them reimburse you with points to repurchase everything so that you can play arcade games on more than one profile. We just use my profile most of the time anyway, so we were gonna just buy new games.

Funny thing is, I replaced my old 360 for an Elite console. My old one did not have any RROD's so it was fine.

Unfortunately, the Elite one I had RROD'd midday when I tried to play Crackdown. Since I have that one year plan from EB (major :tpg: insert here), I plan to trade it in for another one.

So I packed my Elite one and all of it's cables to a backpack and went to the store. Showed the clerk my receipt and when I started taking out the console from the backpack, they just told me to put it in it's original box. Sure, why not.

So I go back home and just to make sure it's really defective (another :tpg: move), I plugged it back in.

And it worked perfectly (aka 4 green lights are a go). No RRODing, no nothing.

I thought it was the strangest fault in a console I have ever seen. A fucking miracle, I must say.

It did not want to go back into its original box. It will never go back into its original box.

New Xbox Experience (i.e. the new dashboard update) is arriving on November 19th. So just over a month to go then. [ source ]

Xbox Experience? Wow, I thought that Experience as a management buzzword had died out with the 90's.

Let's not forget this is from the company that brought us Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates doing nothing. They're hardly up on what's hip these days.

Haha, true. I guess that's the one edge Sony have always had over MS. Having associated movie and music companies means they're bound to produce something fairly relevant to modern styles and tastes once in a while, even by accident. The thought of Microsoft ever commissioning Wipeout without telling them to replace all the decent techno with screeching hair metal and dissaffected kiddie punk is laughable.

So, that NXE. I am a total faggot and decided to write a giant review about it because I've had the writing bug the past week or so and I managed to score the NXE through the Early Access Preview thing. (So, I'll admit I'm also gloating. God dammit I'm entitled to brag once every two years :( )

I will admit I'm thoroughly impressed by what they did, and the best part is even if you irrationally hate the entire fucking thing for some reason, they've got enough functionality in the Guide now (finally) that you won't even have to mess with it most of the time if you don't want to. I'm personally a sucker for eye candy so I probably will.

Also, the SPEED. The dashboard itself rarely had any of those annoying "Loading" screens, I haven't had to wait for my game collection to load once (55 games took a while on the old dash) and the guide seems to pull up faster and at a better framerate than the old one. It feels more mature, more polished, and best of all, not NEARLY as cluttered.

I will say, though, old themes, while they work, do NOT look so hot on a HDTV. They're stretched (unless there's a way to not have it stretch) and they look pretty wonky. Fortunately it comes with four NXE themes that all look okay and there's already a few NXE-compatile ("Premium") themes available. Those look really nice, and even skin the "Friends" panel. Right now everyone on mine has various Gears-y "gunmetal gray and destroyed things" behind them, it's neat. In terms of which pictures get shown, the one that currently displays on the starting tab is the one you see 90% of the time. The other ones only get shown when you're doing things like messing with photos and other stuff deep inside menus, which is kind of a shame.

The Community Games they have available, for lack of a better word, suck. They're all nothing better than you'd find at a flash game site in terms of gameplay value, and in a couple of games' cases in the case of graphics as well. Fortunately, they do all have demos, and in a change from the norm on Xbox, they're time-limited. There's no onscreen timer that I've seen, though, and it's kind of annoying. When you run out of time, it basically tells you "Either unlock the game or you're getting booted back to the dash." Kinda sucks, but hey, it's free. And there are a few of them that released at the 200 MSP pricepoint.

I love the little coverflow-esque way to navigate through most everything. The Friends one doesn't make too much sense just yet, and I think that has a lot to do with how I'm the only person on my friends list who has an avatar and therefore I get to browse through a lovely collection of black silhouettes. When there are Parties going and shit, though, that'll probably be a well-organized way to view Friends. I hope.

To allay some people's fears:

No, you do NOT have to use the Avatar as your gamerpicture at all. In fact, you have to go out of your way to make it your private picture, because the "Take Gamerpicture" button in the Avatar-making program only sets your public one. It presents you with a selection of randomly generated avatars, you can pick one and be done with it in like 15 seconds. It's a neat idea, actually, they let you mess with it if you want to but make it easy enough to get it out of your way if you don't.

The Guide has all the functions in the current Dashboard. Weirdly, you can select options like "System Settings" while in a game, but then it'll tell you you need to get back to the Dashboard to actually do it. Kind of odd, but I guess it's for those who just can't STAND the NXE and want to find everything the old way.

Yes, you CAN delete games with 0 Gamerscore. It took me a while to find it, but in the new Guide there's a much easier to reach achievements page (Finally, that seemingly redundant Achievements menu in the old dashboard has a purpose! You can look at all your achievements via the guide without going through 3 menus!) and THAT has the removal of games feature. Not the other two different places in the NXE that you can see gamerscore, which threw me off.

In Parties, you can set your own chat channel to either party chat (similar to private, overriding the game's chat) or game chat, and it shows an icon next to a person in the party menu when they're not listening to the party chat.

I've not installed a game to the HDD, and the sad truth behind that is that I simply don't have enough room on my HDD to install one and didn't feel like finding things to delete. I've heard good things, though.

All in all, I'm quite impressed. This is a great job by Microsoft of fixing something that resisted being broken for years, and here's to hoping it won't need another facelift.