Sordid: Our Affair with the Xbox 360 (Part I)

When I first got my Xbox 360 in August of 2006 I’d already had a couple friends suffer through the infamous Red Ring of Death. I got mine from a guy on Craigslist and, seriously, it was a good deal. He was one of those hip young guys who buys new things because he has money to flaunt and then gets tired of them within a week. The power cords were still in their plastic bags and the retail box was in great shape. Unfortunately, within a few weeks I experienced my first Red Ring of Death.

I called up Microsoft support and the rep from India ordered up a cardboard coffin for me. In the meantime a friend of mine sweet talked his acquaintances at EBGames and got them to switch out my dead 360 in the stead of his EB-warranty-covered console. This is Xbox 360 number two and it survived from late 2006 until early 2008, but it wasn’t pretty.

Along the way the disc drive developed a nasty habit of not opening and if a game was left idle long enough the drive would spin down and only start back up after a reset. Many hours of progress were lost on countless games. The Dashboard had a few quirks of its own and would sometimes lose sight of our Profiles (yikes!), lock up, and take ages to display images in the Marketplace. Finally one day a few weeks ago I got a long-overdue visit from my good friend Monsieur RedRings.

Upset at not being able to play Dynasty Warriors 6, Shang Xiang bought us a brand new 360 Pro from our local Meijer store while I set up delivery of another coffin. We hooked up the new Xbox and almost instantly noticed some quirks. When turning it on the central power light would illuminate but the whole thing would sit there, seemingly dumbfounded at the prospect of working, until it was turned back off and powered on again. Not long after we got the official “screw you” in the form of an E74 error and assumed that the GPU wrapped some ribbon cables around its neck and bid a last farewell to this world. Poor Xbox 360 Number 3, we hardly knew you.

Thankfully, the docile staff at Meijer let us return the limp 360 Pro after two weeks and exchange it for a sleek black Elite model. It was our choice to pay the extra $100 on top of the exchange for the Elite, rationalizing that its production run may have outgrown the suicidal emo nature of the white Pro models. Back home and powered up, the Elite has been running just fine, though the 120 gb hard drive is sitting idle next to the console. It’s hard to just give up two years of GamerPics, themes, and save files, which brings us to our current predicament: memory transfer.

Unfortunately, this tale has grown so long and frightful that I’ll save this next chapter in our years-long torture at the hands of Microsoft for tomorrow. Tune in then for the horrors of… THE MEMORY UNIT THAT GOT AWAY!