Well, today the Xbox 360 Elite came out in stores, and also today, my Xbox 360 Premium died. It had been locking up on me since last weekend. Actually, not true. It had locked up on other people, but yesterday it finally locked up on me, too. Today, I tried turning it on, and I got the three red lights indicating a hardware failure.

I'm going to see if they'll let me pay the difference and upgrade to the Elite, but I kind of doubt they will. Worth a shot, though.

I was hoping to wait until the Fall, though, when they start using the smaller 65nm CPUs. The current Elite is only a minor design change, as in color, HDMI, and 120 GB hard drive. I would like the extra space, and the HDMI, but other than that it seems to be a half-assed new version. People have wanted their 360s to be quieter, and this new version isn't. Decoding of the new surround formats would have been nice, but apparently the 360's audio path isn't wide enough. This is the audio path on the motherboard before getting to the HDMI 1.2 connection, apparently. The Spring Dashboard update will let you output in DTS 1.5mbps, though, which is an improvement, but still, you'd think they'd have done a more thorough overhaul all around when they decided to make a more expensive version of their console.

Who else here has had the 3 red lights? It seems to be all too common.

I had the same problem right after I purchased my 360, I called microsoft they sent me a return label and box, I had it back within a week, no charge and no problems since. That was a problem with the first line of 360's. I believe they have also extended the warranties on the 360 for a year.

I got mine in March of last year, I think, which puts me out of warranty. I remember making sure I didn't get one of the launch units, though. They had made a change (I forget what it was) to address overheating issues, so I made sure I had one of those. Some are saying that the motherboard warps over time, and it breaks a connection. With the Elite, apparently they just put some epoxy on it instead of really redesigning the motherboard. So I guess we'll see how effective that fix is.

Not that I really know what I'm talking about. I'm just regurgitating things I've seen mentioned.

Give MS the finger, dump the 360, and get a Wii. All the cool kids are doing it.


(wow. I'm a Wii shill and I don't even have one!)

Well, it would be somewhat dumb to just dump the 360 when I've bought around 35 Live Arcade games for it, as well as numerous TV show downloads. So I'll definitely be replacing the one that died. I have a Wii, too, but I haven't done a whole lot with it. I only have Wii Sports. I'll get other games eventually. The controls are all right, but honestly, I find it just as frustrating to use as a more conventional controller. But yeah, I'll always be a Nintendo fan. The main Mario and Zelda games are always solid. I doubt I'll ever get tired of them.