The Xbox homecoming

My Xbox 360 has finally returned from Microsoft’s repair center in Texas.  It arrived yesterday afternoon – exactly two weeks from the day I shipped it.  The turnaround time wasn’t bad, all things considered.  My experiences with the repair are very positive overall.

I initially hesitated to ship it because Microsoft supposedly offered to send a box for shipment.  Since I didn’t want some inadequacy in my packing process to be responsible for physical damage to the console during shipment, I requested a box instead of opting to print an eLabel and supply a box of my own.  Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t sending boxes out anymore.  The same issue was reported on Kotaku about a week ago – and I can confirm its validity.  Let me repeat: contrary to what Microsoft has claimed, they are not sending shipping boxes – at least they didn’t for my particular request.  I’m not sure if it’s a location-specific issue (I live in California) or if it’s a global policy.  I even called customer support to make sure I wasn’t going to receive a box at some later point in time.  I was told that no box was shipped.  By the way, getting a hold of an actual human on Microsoft’s customer service line is a real pain.  I had to look online to find out how to speak to someone fleshy.  I believe the method is to not do or say anything when prompted.  Eventually, you’re redirected to a human rep.  So that box-waiting ended up being a waste of four days, as all I ended up receiving in the mail was a UPS shipping label – the very same thing I could have printed at home much earlier.

To prepare for shipment, I removed the Xbox’s hard drive.  I took an old cardboard box I had lying around, put a generous lining of junk mail, and rested the Xbox on it.  I then used whatever remaining newspaper-type material I had and surrounded the Xbox with it.  Since I didn’t quite have enough paper, I took a spare phonebook, tore pages out, and used it to ensure the console was snug in the box.  I taped it up, affixed the label, and handed the box to UPS the next morning.  Even though I was misled about being sent a box, the packing and shipping process was relatively painless.

Then I waited.  It took most of one week to arrive at the repair center.  The repair itself only seemed to take two or three business days.  The return shipment took another chunk of a week.  I had hoped to get the console in time for the weekend, but I ended up having to wait until Monday.  I was also lucky that my wife was taking that day off, as the return shipment requires a signature upon receipt.  The Xbox site was very informative regarding the status of the repair – it indicated when they had received the console, when they had finished fixing it, and the site even supplied a tracking number for the return shipment.

So, after two Xbox-less weeks, voila!  The console arrived safe and sound.  It even came with a 1-month Xbox Live Gold subscription card attached for my trouble.  Honestly, though, 1-month doesn’t really cover it for me – I lost the first two (three, counting the fruitless wait for a shipping box) feverish weeks immediately following Street Fighter IV’s release.  It seems that a lot of the hype is beginning to die down, and I’m sure that the competition on Live is much steeper now.   I can’t get those few weeks of potential practice back.  I’m now behind the rest of the curve.

I have to admit I was a bit hesitant to believe that the repair service had done anything.  The problem is that the red ring doesn’t appear immediately after turning on the Xbox.  Generally, after a cold boot, the Xbox will run fine for a few minutes before hanging.  It usually takes several attempts of running and hanging before the red ring appears on the next boot.  If the repair service didn’t bother to make those multiple attempts, they might have ended up concluding that nothing was wrong and sent me my original, broken console back.  Fortunately, they did, in fact, fix the problem – probably by replacing the components.  From what I’ve read about the issue, it would take nothing less than a swap-out to remedy the issue entirely.  I do know that my original faceplate was preserved (I know because I lost the spring on the USB cover panel); it’s probably safe to assume I got it in my original case, too; as for the internals, it’s really anyone’s guess.

But I’m not content to guess.  I needed to make sure things were right.  So after watching my Monday-night television programming, I hooked up the old girl and took her for a spin.  I was startled by the fact that my original display settings were reset and it almost looked like the console had to reinstall NXE again.  I’m guessing it was because the internals were brand new, and the firmware was still out-of-date.  After watching that ridiculously long NXE intro again, everything was back to the way it was (except for the system time).  I popped in Rock Band 2 – a game I sorely missed – and played a set with my wife to make sure the console didn’t freeze after a few minutes of play.  After inserting the disc, the first thing I thought to myself was that the disc drive seemed much quieter than I remembered.  Maybe it was just the fact that I had gone three weeks without it, but I could’ve sworn that the drive used to be a lot louder.  It’s possible that the repairs also resulted in a swap-out of the old drive.  Which is totally fine with me.  That thing was noisy.

Anyway, after Rock Band 2, I finally popped in Street Fighter IV and continued to play it for the next few hours.  Everything seemed to be in order.  I now have a three-month repair warranty on the console, so if anything went wrong with their repair, I can send the console in again.  I’m not entirely sure whether the extended red-ring warranty of three years applies to a repair warranty.  I can’t see any evidence of it on the Xbox site, so I’m inclined to believe that I won’t be covered by the repair warranty if another red-ring occurs after more than three months.

Let’s just hope that Microsoft speaks the truth when they say that the worst of the red-ring problems are behind them.