Launch 360 Owners Now Gaming Unprotected

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March 23 marks the third anniversary of the Xbox 360’s Australian launch. And to celebrate, as Jason Hill notes on his Screenplay blog this morning, gamers who bought their console on launch day will now find that extended warranty to cover “red ring of death” hardware failures no longer applies.

At launch, the Xbox 360 came with a 1-year warranty. Then we discovered the “red ring of death”. Microsoft discovered it too and in July 2007 extended the console warranty to three years to protect us against those three red lights.

Now that three years is up, at least for some of us. But every day a few more of us will be gaming unprotected on their Xbox 360s. And if it breaks, we’ll be forking out $150 to get it fixed.

I’ve been fairly fortunate, I guess. I bought my 360 in February 2007; it suffered persistent disc-read errors before red-ringing just over a year later. I was able to get a brand new replacement that’s served me well to this day. It’s less noisy, too.

With the smaller, cooler “Jasper” chips in all recently manufactured consoles, hardware failure ought to become more of a rare occurrence than the all-too-common malaise it has been. So how do you feel about unprotected Xbox gaming? How many times have you sent your console in for repair? Is anyone’s launch console still working?

Bittersweet anniversary [Screenplay]


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