The solution

With my COD4 obsession in full force and with games like Army of Two and Rainbow 6:Vegas 2 coming out in a few weeks I simply cannot be without an XBOX 360 for a month or more. But I also cannot afford to outright buy a new 360.

Costco has an incredible return policy. 90 days, no questions asked. That was the plan, buy a new one at Costco and return it when I get my repaired one back. There is a Costco about 5 miles from where I work so at lunchtime on Thursday I went there to get an XBOX 360. There was only one flaw in my brilliant plan: They were not selling any XBOX 360s. They had plenty of PS3s but no 360s. In a panic and my plan in tatters, I went to the Walmart next door. 14 day return policy. Damn! Not enough time. Spotted a Best Buy and went there, 30 day return policy, all right plan B in effect, grabbed an Arcade for $279, $303 after taxes! The only problem is that they have a 15% restocking fee, so I'll be paying a $40 rental fee for my months use.

Up Next:
A deal too good to turn down.

Posted by VenomRudman @ 8:50 pm EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

Red Ring of Death

Wednesday night I joined the legions of XBOX 360 owners who have received the Red Ring of Death. I was playing COD4 with my boys from the PorkChopPlatoon when at the end of my last match of the night, the screen got a bit fuzzy. After the match I started fiddling with the video connections, but nothing seemed to help so I rebooted and ended up with the dreaded red ring. This is not the first time the box has been in service, I had a problem last August where the disks had problems being read and getting stuck in the tray. I had hoped that they would have fixed ALL the possible problems but it appears that all they did was stick a new disk drive in instead of being pre-emptive and fixing the potential RROD problems. Your choices when you have a problem is either call xbox support or use the website. I had no desire to explain my problems to some heavily accented Indian so I used the website which is what I did the when my disk drive failed. The first time I did this it took almost a week for Microsoft to respond to my problem, I figured that was a fluke. I'm now going on 2 days since I filled out the xbox.com form, I've not gotten a confirmation email and I'm thinking I really should have called. When I first had a problem, I had to register my console and then request a repair. But what bugs me is that when I went back to xbox.com, I had to register my console AGAIN! Why? I had already resistered it. There is no reason why that info was not stored and the morons at Microsoft could use that info to find out how many people they've screwed because they've had to send back their console more than once. Up next: What to do about not having an XBOX 360.....

Posted by VenomRudman @ 9:32 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments