The RRoD is sort of one of those things you read about all the time, but if you haven't experienced it you feel like its almost a myth, or curse, that has hopefully passed you by. That's how I've always felt anyway. Then suddenly I fell victim to the sinister beast.
Thankfully Microsoft did the right thing with extending existing owners to a 3 year warranty against the RRoD. I called 1-800-4-MY-XBOX (this number works in both Canada and US) on a Friday night at 7:30pm PST and got through within 2-3 minutes to a tech support agent. Now that's impressive.
He walked me through a few steps, and we confirmed a RRoD General Hardware Failure. He then offered to either ship me a box (~5 business days) or send me a fully paid electronic waybill to ship the X360 back absolultely free. I chose to go with the waybill since we have plenty of boxes here.
I was told the turnaround is about 2-3 weeks. I was concerned about the horror stories of bad repairs or refurbished units that die soon after being sent as RRoD replacements, so I talked to the fellow some more. He told me that apparently in Canada if you get the RRoD they take your 360 back and give you a brand new unit with a new manufacture date, which presumably means I get a Jasper system, with the redesigned cooler, 65nm CPU/GPU and 150W PSU (vs 175W PSU). This is highly exciting to me also since I think it means I'll have HDMI out (currently I don't).
How it all happened
I don't play my Xbox alot. Probably around 3-5hrs a week depending on time, but as much as 10-15hrs when I'm really into a game. I've had my box for around 2years, but when I played GOW1 I had a few overheating related lockups. Lately in the past 2 months I've had maybe 3-4 lockups accompanied by video artifacts. Tonight I got one, and right afterwards the famous ring.
Good Experience So Far
Well anyway, RRoD sucks, but the customer service was fast, patient/courteous, and it looks to be effective. I'll keep my fingers crossed. So far this is one of the best customer service experiences I've ever had.
xbox 360 rrod red ring of death
Redemption blogged
Good to know not all the customer service experiences aren't bad..hopefully they're always aiming to improve it, something I think pretty well any decent company should be after.
Xbox 360 service is generally pretty good. I had to send it in with my decals since removing them would've ruined the skin anyway. I wrote a note asking them to please be careful with the decals because I like them very much and could not remove them without screw 'em up anyway.
Came back without a scratch.
Glad yours didn't turn into one of those horror stories we all read about.
Good luck on getting back a fully usable Xbox Red! (Y)
I guess they were just all on vacation
How about if you buy a PS3 I shall do 100 unique page edits (adding proper content) a day for a week on the wiki's...