Tomorrow I get to call Microsoft and ask them how to get my 360 fixed.

I’m actually GLAD this finally happened.

My console has a manufacture date of 9/11/2006 and I was worried that it might survive, against considerable odds, until its third birthday – and, thus, be out of warranty – before it finally died.

It allllmost made it to 2 years old. That’s pretty good, I think.
Maybe the 360 Replacement Gods will be smiling on me and they’ll see fit to upgrade me to a new model with a quieter fan and HDMI output. That would be a beautiful thing.

Update: After a reasonably short – 20 minutes – conversation with a CSR over at Xbox service, they’re emailing me a shipping label to use when sending the console back to them.  No free shipping box for me, but they took great pains to reinforce the whole thing about the repair being free of charge because Microsoft has extended the warranty to three years for this issue and aren’t I a lucky guy?

Despite horror stories I’ve heard about enforced troubleshooting, the CSR didn’t make me jump through too many hoops. He had me unplug all the cables, plug them back in, verified that I was still seeing three red lights, and skipped straight to the “it’s broken, we’ll fix it” part of his script.

There was no nonsense about removing the hard drive, laying the system flat, plugging it into the mains instead of into an outlet strip, none of that, and no questions about whether I had done anything to the console or tried using any non-Microsoft-approved accessories with it.

I quite appreciated this, though I was ready to step through it all for the sake of not causing some poor phone slave too much grief.

So, 24-48 hours until I get a shipping label, then 2-3 weeks turnaround. Here’s hoping it goes well.