The “Break it Down” Blog

I just had an awesome experience with a good friend and my XBox… let me recap what just occured…

1. Turn on XBox, it logs into XBL
2. Get a Chat request from good friend
3. … Accept Chat …
4. Friend: “Hey, so what made you login to the evil empire?”
5. Me: “Oh, just finished playing the demos on PSN, wanted to see what was up on XBL.”
6. Friend: “Cool, I got BioShock, it’s awesome!”
7. Me: “Nice!”
8. <Now I start browsing through the game demos, and begin a download of one>
9. Friend: “Yea I’m almost done with it… it’s…”
10. Me: “It’s what?”
11. <silence>
12. Then I suddenly notice that the UI isn’t pulsating, the download isn’t going and I can’t do anything.
13. Me: “Ha, I guess chatting locks up the XBox, lemme reset it” (talking to myself at this point)
14. I hit the power button, wait a few seconds and hit it again and VIOLA… RRoD.

So thank you Microsoft. Thank you for the excellent hardware and software you continue to grace us with. The only joy I get out of this is know that somewhere, my return is going to cost Microsoft $100s of dollars to process (when you factor in the salaries of all the employees that are involved in the process plus the hardware).

Update #1: Oh god this is gold. If you remember a few months back I had to deal with Microsoft support because of my HD-DVD drive failing, I just started down the road of figuring out how to get my RRoD’ed XBox services and this is already par for the course… check it out. The page below is the XBox.com support page for the RRoD issue. Notice the two most important links for me are both invalid:

Update #2: I guess they mean the “Repair Agent” link and not the “Console Repair?” link that doesn’t exist?

The icing on the cake here is that with Firefox as your browser, clicking that link takes you to the Passport login page. No matter how many times you login, right after logging in you are redirected to the XBox.com home page. If you click Support > Repair Agent again, you are just cycled right back to the Passport login page… over and over again.

So let’s try this bitch in IE… hahah it does the same thing in IE, just cycles over and over again. There is apparently no way to login.

Update #3: Ok so I just ended up calling 1-800-4MY-XBOX and got “Mazi” on the phone… who sounded almost identical to the CS rep I worked with the first time I called unfortunately. But this time support went more smoothly. Total call time was about 20 mins, lots of confirmation and re-confirmation of addresses/IDs and so on, but I didn’t mind that. They are sending me a repair box, so hopefully all will be fixed in 4-6 weeks when it finds its way back to me fixed.