The point of the friends question is to find out if the non-games-press reading gamers are aware of the rrod via seeing it happen to others.

What year did you buy your Xbox 360? I keep getting nervous that mine will have some horrible break down in the near future but I bought mine last Christmas. This site has a long list of Xbox 360 lot numbers, which seems to correlate with Xbox 360 break downs.

Ugh, here's the site I mentioned.
http://www.360drives.com/list

This has to be correct I have not turned on my 360 for 2 months been playing an mmo. Ten min into playing GTA the damn thing red rings. This was 2 days ago and still pissed.

I got my 360 last christmas too nori, and it doesn't help that when it comes to things breaking down I am pretty darn unlucky. That percentage of break downs is huge!

I put my 360 in the middle of my room on a raised platform to keep the thing as cool and dust free as possible...

I am on #3 myself.

Is the current generation of X360 hardware up to snuff? I've waited forever to get one (love my PS3 but all my friends are on Live) but I can't afford to be melting silicone every few months. This article doesn't make me feel too secure. Does anyone here have one of the newer hardware configs?

I have one of the new 360 ( I got the red resident evil one) and its the latest chipset, the Jasper. I've had it for 6 months now, and been great. It doesn't even get hot after playing it for a few hours straight. If you are going to get a new 360, go for the jasper chipset. You can tell its a Jasper by The wattage of the PSU. 150 Watts instead of 175. Also, 4A instead of 4.7A.

hmm i've had mine since February it it's stlil working great. i havn't had any issues aside from it freezing from time to time but i just restart it and it's fine after that.

My 360 bit the big one (E74 error) 5 minutes after completing the latest update. My 'friends' did the same thing a few days later. He intentionally delayed getting the update after I told him what happened to me. He finally updated and boom, E74 error. Lame Mr. Softy. Super Duper Lame.

I have had my XBox since June 2008 without any issues, knock on wood. After that comment, my luck I'll turn it on tonight and "BOOM"

Surely we can all see the selection bias problem here, wherein people with failed Xboxen are far more interested in taking a Game Informer survey than people with boring, functional consoles.

I mean, I know this isn't some million dollar double-blind drug efficacy study, but it's not like they randomly picked 100 people off the street and 55 of them had failed 360's. We're talking about some web poll, right? Or at best an email asking people to click a link and fill out a survey about failed Xbox 360's?

The one called Geoff seems to speak truth.

I bought mine wayy back in 2005 and here is my story ... ... .... ....

Okay .. so wayy back in 2005 my girlfriend (now wife) bought me a 360 for my birthday along w/ a 2yr replacement warr. from best buy. And i admit being somewhat noobish thinking i had a great console, and was content until a month b4 the 2yr replacement warr. was about to xpire.. and seeing that there was a new version of the 360 (w/HDMI out and not those ugly cables) i took my 360 back to best buy and xchanged it for a new one (Keeping the orignal 20gig HDD (puny isn't it ) and getting yet another 2yr replacement plan from best buy this was now 2007

And some time passed and my 360 sat there idle as i was addicted to WoW (from about Oct 2006-about a month ago) and my 2yr warranty was again about to xpire .. well i was getting tired of paying for XBL and WoW's subscription fees , so i said y not ..

AND THATS when it happend i packed up the 360 and went to bestbuy and got me a brand spank'n new PS3 (80gig no bundle)but thats where having a decent amount of games for the 360 and Gamestop comes in and i traded in all my accessories games and walked out w/ 3 fairly decent games ( Assassins creed UT3 and Kane&Lynch Dead Men(that one was free). .. .. .. and to top it off i had recently bought a few games from Blockbuster and was able to xchange them for Haze, GTA VI , DMC 4, Merc's 2 WiF.

Then i Rented KZ2 .. OMG .. Gears/halo or any other 360 FPS has got nothing on KZ2 but i digress

IMO the ps3 outta the box is far better in almost every way ... Blutooth, Blu-ray, not to mention ya can upgrade the HDD w/o having to buy and over priced 360 only HDD, along with apps like YDL, PS3 Media server ... omg .. .. i love my wife cause w/o her the ps3 wouldn't have been part of my life (from a price point)

AND YES MY CONSOLE FROZE FROM TIME TO TIME WHICH IS Y I TOOK IT BACK .. this isn't they days of NES .. a FULLY FUNCTIONING PEICE OF Hardware SHOULD NOT FREEZE as OFTEN AS THE 360 does ..

Well the date made on mine was 2007-09-14 and yea it makes it a bit dated. I want to make a point that it was hardly on. I did not play 6 hours a day 7 days a week. Lite use worked just fine turned it on after 2 months non use ROD. Mine does have smaller CPU and updated heatsinks. I love the games but the the need to ditch the whole system. I am not going to buy another it already my second one. They want to have a super long life cicle with something that dont even work. Lost me as a customer till its gone. I am no fanboy but not going to just throw money to the wind. I am getting it fixed and going to sale it for PS3 slim. I hate to see it go :''( but its like a bad girlfriend sometimes you got to give up.

Geoff your correct not saying you are wrong about it. I ask you this why can I take 5 of my friend and count 8 broken 360s. I will say that none of the broken was a jasper tho. I just kind of shocked at that kind of failure rate.

I've had mine bout a year, it went red ring about three months later. BUT I was told to detach the powersupply from the outlet and console, after pluging it all back together again it worked.

Yeah that trick may work Icon1 .. and how about the TOWEL TRICK .. these are only temp fixes ..

Shoddy craftsmanship

Well, I'm not a gamer by any means, but my son is, and he has had more trouble with the 360 than any other system -- ever!! His first 360 was stolen, the next two quit working within hours of setup. That's a pretty bad track record, imo.

I combined a number of fixes, as the problem lies in the fact that the some of the bga solder balls aren't making contact anymore, you have to prevent to motherboard from flexing (which is caused by the heat of the cpu/gpu).

I put new better heatsink clamps on the cpu/gpu, used the xecuter pads to prevent to board from flexing to much and put in an xcm fan to keep things a bit cooler. I'm trouble free for about a year now.

You can tutorials on how to fix the clamps all over the net, the pads you can buy or make yourself and the xcm fan is also for sale in a lot of places.

The only game I originally bought XBOX 360 for (and got it near the same time) was for HALO 3. Which unfortunately recently started coming up with a "dirty disk" error when playing HALO 3 and ONLY Halo 3... though I now play Ghost Recon AW 1 and 2 as well. That's the only issue, though annoying... reading these other comments now I'm concerned I won't be able to fix the problem without inviting more issues... :(

It's amazing how quickly these forums devolve into nonsensical gibberish once you get talking about video games.

Disdain at web stupidity aside, my wife bought me a 360 two years ago for Father's Day. Less then a month later, it fried. No red ring of death, but plenty of disc read errors and major graphics problems. Fortunately, since it was still under warranty, I was able to trade it in for a new one.

So yeah, after less than 30 days ownership, I was already on my second 360. This one's been pretty reliable (knock on wood). It better keep kicking long enough for me to check out Project Natal.

Launch day console? Dead. Replacement? Died too, had it fixed. So yeah, the original XBOX 360 with the original motherboard and fan/heatsink design was crap. But who is having problems with the newer and later designs? Nobody I know of, and my Halo 3 Limited Edition console has been working trouble free since I bought it.

Mine is not jasper but it had the newer cpc and heatsink the same found in Halo 3 console. I only want to know why we have to buy 3 diffrent desings to get a working console. Everyones fix is spend 600 800 bucks or more on every updated motherboard lol. When you going to wake up and realize microsoft dont care about the consumer. I swear the only reason they even have high sales numbers is cause people rather buy new one then get a refurb for 100 bucks.

i've had my 360 for almost 2 years now, and I havent had a single failure or hicup with it. Ofcourse, I keep it far away from the carpet, I clean dust out of it reguarly, and I added an aftermarket external Intercooler that pulls more airflow through it. Since I added the intercoler, i've notice that it does run smoother and quieter. and you can find the things for like $20 at walmart or radioshack. It even runs off of its own powersupply, instead of being one of those that run off the USB port.

I bought one in nov. 08 and not a prob yet. I don't game on it much due to the controller(big clumsy hands) and I have a gaming pc which I like better.
The wifey uses it everyday as a media extender to watch two soaps that are recorded on the vista pc with tuner card which works well. I had nothing but problems with the cable company's dvr setup.
I have always left the power supply on the hardwood floor on it's side behind the tv stand. I figure better heat dissipation with more surface area exposed. The 360 is set on the side and has the 12g drive on top. Still has over one year left of the 3 year warranty. So time will tell but so far so good.

I fix 360's all the time. They keep me in money. Money to buy ps3 games. I myself have had ps3 for 2 years and not a problem. Might as well get a ps3 due to slim coming out and you'll start to see the shift of exclusive titles going back to the ps3.

the 360 refers to the number of days per year in the repair shop, on average. My X-box 360 broke some time ago, as did the 2 x-boxs i had before it. My 30 year old intellivision still works great.

I have 2 xbox360's and both of them failed. My friend's 360 also failed.

I still have my original 360. Never failed with hours and hours of use. I was told that it mattered where you bought the 360. Some stores paid more for extra packing protection and those are the machines that did not fail. The stores that were too cheap to pay - failed.

I'm on my 9th repaired system. Um..... it's not luck its poor quality.

So that is why Microsoft is selling so many Xboxes. I wonder what their sales figures would be if you only count the ones that work. To be fair, I had to buy three Playstation 3's. Of course I haven't had problems with any of them as they are all still connected to three different TV's.

Interesting!

I had a 360 for a little less than a year that error-ed, then started freezing, then red ringed, then quit working entirely. So I call MS customer support, they sent me a box to ship it to their repair dept. about a week later ( that was fast ) I got, not a repaired 360 but a brand new one! Cool! for about 7 months. What the Hell? How can a company like MS put this crap out on the market? Don't they do extensive testing? Maybe they're concentrating more on making 25 year old millionaires instead of quality products? I'm not just talking about the 360 either, how about the OS's and pc games? Truly I say WTF?! Quality control should be your top priority not how much money you can make selling crap to the consumer. Sooner or later all of us are going to look elsewhere for our entertainment if you keep showing you don't really care about our satisfaction with your products.

I chose not to buy a 360 because the original X-Box was so prone to die.