Well I read all the posts and articles about people experiencing hardware failure problems with their Xbox 360. I thought to myself, “nah” that’s not going to happen to me.

Sure enough, I got the system on December 12, 2005 I have been playing it since then without a single issue. As you can see from my gamerscoe on the gamercard on this site I have played quite a bit and enjoyed it.

So as I said, the thing has been working flawlessly for months and life was good. Today, I got home and decided to play a little Oblivion before dinner so I started it up and it loaded Oblivion fine. Hit Continue and the game started to load my saved game…then rather than see the graphical goodness of Oblivion I saw a bizzarre graphics corruption that reminded me of my old PC gamer days with video artifacts.

Thinking this was just a minor hiccup, I turned the system off, waited a few seconds and then turned it back on eager to get back to Oblivion.

Then it happened – my worst Xbox 360 nightmare – the dreaded 3 Blinking Lights of Doom. This signal is supposed to indicate that either the system is “overheating” or “hardware failure”. I immediately knew it couldn’t possibly be overheating since it had only been on for like 3 mins before it croaked. Also I had played several long sessions in the past five months when an overheating issue would have presented itself.

That led me to sad belief that my $500 video game console had for no apparent reason committed suicide. Not quite sure what drove it to do this since I had treated it quite well but I guess that’s life.

Called Microsoft at 1-800-4-MYXBOX and the guy took my info down. The process is that they will send an empty box (upto 3 days) to me, I return it (? days), they fix it (2 days) and ship it back (upto 3 days) – so all in all we’re looking at like 2 weeks or so to get it back.

What a pain and very dissapointing that something like this could happen without any type of warning.

The only silver lining in this ordeal is that my warranty was supposed to expire 4 days from today so had this issue happened next week, I’d have to pay money for this nonense.

I’ll report back on the process and how long it takes.

BE WARNED if you have an Xbox 360 – it can happen at any time so enjoy it while you can