Red Ring of Death
Adonis, 25 Oct 2008 4:56 PM
Why not today? Why not right now? I woke up this morning and checked a few things using my brand spankin' new Dell e6500... My CPU spun up to 100% which it had done several times in the past thanks to some of the Dell-installed utils like SMManager.exe.
I looked around for the culprit but couldn't find anything fishy. "I'll do the safe shutdown and reboot - everything will be fine," or so I thought. When the box finally got through closing the open apps, finished shutting down and started going through the restart sequence, the thing blue screened right when I'd expect the Vista logo to show up. I rebooted a couple times, ran some diagnostics, ran some more diagnostics, ran the really hard-core ones that take hours...
So, while my diagnostics were running, why not play a little NCAA'09 - nothing soothes like pounding some t-sips and listening to that nationally famous Fightin' Texas Aggie band play Noble Men of Kyle with every touchdown (custom stadium sounds = teh coolness)... except that a few minutes into my game, the system shutdown (black screen). "Ah man!" I rebooted the XBOX, restarted my game and a few minutes later, black screen... I called 1-800-4My-XBOX - their systems are down right now so I can't open a ticket but the guy is pretty sure I'm going to have to send it back. Great.
Got a haircut, had a shower...
I went back to my laptop - diagnostics all finished - nothing is wrong with the laptop according to the diagnostics. There's no temp meter I can find in the BIOS but I'm sure now that the CPU is overheating - I've let the laptop cool - we'll see later. Go back to the XBOX - it's been a few hours since I played it last. Power on - the mythical Red Ring of Death... Well, at least I know what the problem is. My XBOX got the red-ring-worm... My second one... Thank you MS for the three-year-warrantee... Starting to wonder how many times I'll get to use it.
Laptop status? Man, I don't care anymore. I'm going out.
Rich Mercer says:
13 Jan 2009 at 9:39 AMOne of those days huh? I hope they fix it quickly for you! :)
Scott Dockendorf says:
13 Jan 2009 at 9:40 AMIf it makes you feel any better, I was blown away at how awesome the XBox Support team performed with my RRoD. It was resolved and shipped back within 5 business days - and they give you a free month of XBox LIVE Gold for your troubles.
Karthik says:
13 Jan 2009 at 9:41 AMMy second xbox died a few weeks ago. And Scott's right, the repair process is much faster and only takes about a week to get fixed. Gotta use your own box though.
Luckily mine died before my warranty runs out in January 2009 :P
Tony says:
13 Jan 2009 at 9:41 AMIs this your way of skipping out on our Bowl game?? ;)
Daniel Rae says:
13 Jan 2009 at 9:42 AMI've had a 360 for 3 years now and no RRoD yet... touch wood it stays that way!