Well, my console finally bit the bullet. It was a sad day in Maniac-land, my box would freeze every 5 minutes, with odd graphic squares, lines and/or fuzz on the screen. I was sure the GPU finally fried from overheating. Panic resulted in buying a new Core system to hold me over until I got this one handled.

Things went well, and I have a new system from Microsoft, at no charge to me. Since I had a unit that was made in 2005, MS had extended my warranty to the end of this year.

The only work I had to do was spend an hour and fifteen minutes on the phone with customer service. Part of that time was my fault, my cell dropped the call. The rest was continually calling back because their “system wasn’t responding” and they couldn’t generate the repair order.

When the repair order was finally accepted, they even offered free shipping by way of sending me a box with a prepaid label. My 360-addicted self already had the beast boxed and sealed waiting for an address and a stroll to the local UPS store, so I went ahead and paid about 13 bucks to get her back sooner.

I was a bit concerned, kinda like rolling your daughter out of her hospital room to go under the knife, but I insured the package and decided to trust MS for once. (yeah, that was a first.)

I patiently waited, resisting the urge to call customer service with a resounding “Get ‘er done, Achmed,” and I received a nice (new?) premium unit 2 weeks to the day, from the day I called and shipped it off. I am happy with this baby, it was mfg’d in June (my first one was from Nov 05) and has the new Samsung DVD drive. My living room no longer sounds like I have a Cessna prepping for takeoff.

Interestingly enough, the Core crutch I bought had 4-5 disc read errors (on Gears) and 1 red-ring on a cold initial startup, over this 2 week span. I had planned to fleabay this thing, but I don’t want Johnny opening up a brick for Xmas and my rep taking a hit, so I’m going back to Circuit City today.

So, since I was prepared for a major hassle, I am very happy I have a new, working console in a decent time frame. Horror stories -1.