Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Xbox 360 UK Repair Timeline: A Gamer’s Renaissance Tale of Woe

When I was still at school I had a big thing for PC and video games. I used to run a Counterstrike clan, played a lot of ran­dom FPS/RTS/wtf titles and had a great time doing so. On the con­sole side I’ve always been a bit behind the times — had a SNES quite some time after they came out, an N64 (with GoldenEye, of course) the Christmas after they were released, and more recently a GameCube and some bor­rowed time on my brother’s PS2. I didn’t even get a Game Boy until the Color ver­sion came out. But I was usu­ally reas­on­ably up to speed with PC gam­ing, from the days of Doom onwards.

In the last few years, more par­tic­u­larly while at Uni, I’ve lost touch some­what with the gam­ing industry, only really touch­ing on the new Valve titles (HL2/Episode One/Two/Portal) and dab­bling in oth­ers (BF2, COD4). The impend­ing release of GTA:IV last month promp­ted me to have a long, hard think about re-entering the scene, and hav­ing a friend circle placed firmly in the Xbox 360 camp pushed me in that dir­ec­tion from the out­set. With the timely arrival of a pay packet from work and the asso­ci­ated shot of con­sumer­ist euphoria which that usu­ally brings, I set about hunt­ing down the best 360 deal I could find.

I settled on Play.com’s (now with­drawn) offer­ing of the Premium con­sole plus GTA:IV, ringing in at a buttock-clenchingly attract­ive £199.99 delivered. I put in an order, together with the offi­cial VGA cable (HDTV isn’t yet some­thing I’ve felt com­pelled to shell out for, so I figured I’d get the best pic­ture on my LG 19″ TFT), and set about grokking everything I could find about the 360, Xbox Live, the accessor­ies, GTA:IV and so on, hop­ing to make up for being a rel­at­ive late­comer to the “sev­enth gen­er­a­tion” by being one of those giant irrit­ants to exist­ing product users, the excit­able new­bie pos­it­ively burst­ing with ques­tions about this, that and the other, “I read on this site that…”, “is it true that…”, ad nau­seum. My 360-veteran friends were remark­ably patient, and after the ini­tial buzz wore off, I settled down to await the arrival of the goods. What fol­lowed was an epis­ode that would have stretched the patience of a saint, the events of which I repro­duce here for the bene­fit of any­one else unlucky enough to find them­selves in the same boat, either wholly or partially.

• Wednesday April 30^th — Order placed with Play.com for Xbox 360, GTA:IV and MS VGA cable
• Thursday May 1^st — Received noti­fic­a­tion of order des­patch from Play.com
• Tuesday May 6^th — Slightly delayed due to Bank Holiday, pack­age arrives from Play.com. With the rev­er­ence of a priest wit­ness­ing the Second Coming, I unpack the box, con­nect the con­sole, and run through the ini­tial set-up and con­fig­ur­a­tion. After regis­ter­ing for Xbox Live and set­ting up just about everything there is to set up, I load up GTA:IV and start play­ing. Around half an hour later as, in-game, I respond to an MSN mes­sage on the whatever-blade, I hear a pop­ping sound from the 360 and the con­sole shuts off. Upon switch­ing on again, I see to my hor­ror… the fabled RROD. Now this doesn’t seem to be a nor­mal RROD — I know (from my obsess­ive pre-arrival grokking) that the usual RROD is born of over­heat­ing, and that the console’s fans etc spin up before show­ing the lights. In my case the fans did not start, and the power brick showed a red light, indic­at­ing some sort of power-related fault. I call Play.com, who tell me that regret­tably they can’t offer the same bundle any more, as they don’t have any Premium con­soles left and GTA:IV is now out of stock, so all they can do is take both items back for a refund. This doesn’t wash with me (it looked like I would have dif­fi­culty lay­ing hands on another copy of GTA:IV for at least two weeks) so I call Microsoft. The guy on the end of the phone gets quite excited when I tell him about the red light on the power brick, say­ing that this almost cer­tainly means a fault with the brick, not the con­sole. He cre­ates a ful­fil­ment order for a replace­ment power brick — no charge — but says that if pos­sible I should test the 360 with someone else’s power brick in the mean­time, just to make sure. I believe him and decide the con­sole is almost cer­tainly not dead.
• Wednesday May 7^th — I find a friend with the newer breed of PSU and head over in the even­ing to test my con­sole. No joy — exact same beha­viour. I am not happy.
• Thursday May 8^th — I call MSFT again and report my res­ults. The agent can­cels the order for the replace­ment PSU and cre­ates a new one for my 360. He gives me the ship­ping options, and I decide the quick­est one will be the email-me-the-packing-label option. He tells me the label may take 24h to be issued. I am not happy.
• Friday May 9^th - The label arrived by email some time after close of busi­ness yes­ter­day (tak­ing less than 24h) so I phone UPS in the AM. Arrange col­lec­tion for between 1 and 5pm and head out to buy a suit­able box and (yay) bubble wrap. UPS arrive and take the 360 around 4pm.
• Monday May 12^th — I receive a pack­age. It’s the can­celled replace­ment PSU! I chuckle. I will use this any­way on the off chance my ori­ginal PSU was dam­aged by the 360’s death rattle.
• Wednesday May 14^th — Package reaches MSFT in Frankfurt in the AM accord­ing to UPS track­ing info.
• Thursday May 15^th — Receive an email in the even­ing report­ing that my con­sole has been repaired and is on its way back to me — 7-day estim­ated deliv­ery win­dow. I have a new UPS con­sign­ment number.
• Saturday May 17^th - Package is with UPS, shows a sched­uled deliv­ery date of Tuesday 20^th. Yay.
• Tuesday May 20^th - UPS deliver my repaired Xbox. Enclosed let­ter reports the mother­board was at fault and has been replaced and extens­ively tested. I’m also given a free month of Live Gold. Confirmed that I got the ori­ginal con­sole back and not a replace­ment (I made a small mark on the back before I sent it off).

I’ll update this as and when I get more inform­a­tion. I just figured it would be use­ful for oth­ers like me ban­ished to the service-level back­wa­ter known as the UK to have some idea how long the repair pro­cess really takes. I was some­what embittered to see that US Xbox cus­tom­ers can expect a 4-day com­plete turn­around time on their repairs (with pack­ing box sup­plied), whereas we seem to be look­ing at 10–14 days. The MSFT agent told me, and the info seems to sup­port this, that the repair oper­a­tion itself doesn’t take long — it’s the car­riage to and from. And con­sid­er­ing that the UK repair centres are so over­loaded that my unit had to go to Germany (oth­ers report Czech Republic and fur­ther afield), it’s not surprising.

There was a sil­ver lin­ing for me at least — I got time to get some work done instead of thrash­ing away the hours in Liberty City. I just hope that hav­ing had this ini­tial bad luck, my con­sole won’t die again for some time to come. It would be just too ironic for the thing to come back hav­ing had a $1 fuse replaced in Frankfurt only to RROD again in a few months due to the over­heat­ing prob­lem. That’s the tradeoff you get for buy­ing online I guess — saved a few quid but lost the con­veni­ence of being able to take the thing back to a high-street shop to swap it over. Ah well.

So any­way. Hopefully when this is all over I’ll be able to guile­fully rein­sert myself into the gam­ing scene, just like the good old days. Halo 3 anyone?

The last word: So a total turn­around time of 11 days — not bad con­sid­er­ing the logist­ics. Exactly two weeks from the ori­ginal turn­ing up to the repaired unit being returned to me. And I got free stuff as well. Everything seems to be work­ing okay now, though I had to re-configure a bunch of set­tings on the con­sole (those which are obvi­ously stored on-chip rather than on the HD/Memory Unit). Got myself a second con­trol­ler and Forza 2 yes­ter­day, and star­ted play­ing via my pro­jector. Hurray for games.