Replacement Xbox 360 Arrives

On November 3, I wrote about my Xbox 360 experiencing the Red-Ring-of-Death (RRoD) (original post here). Today, twenty-five days after shipping my unit out for repair/replacement, I received a replacement unit.

• Replacement Unit: The manufacture date of the replacement unit is 2008-05-29. I presume it is a Falcon. I did not receive a new power supply with the unit. It appears to be brand new (not refurbished).
• Much Quieter: The first thing I noticed was that the replacement unit was much quieter than the jet-engine sound coming out of my older unit. This is terrific. I can barely hear the replacement 360 when it is turned on. A welcome change indeed.
• 1 Month Xbox Live Free: In the box was a card that gave me one free month of Xbox Live. Not much of a bonus given that my box was gone for almost a full month of my current subscription.
• 3 Months Warranty: The replacement unit came with an additional three month warranty beyond the original 3 year warranty period that had just ended. The extended warranty ends on February 26, 2009 – 3 months from the ship date of the replacement unit.

• Needed to Re-Download All Purchased Content: In order for my previously purchased Marketplace content (Halo maps, arcade games etc.) to be properly licensed I had to go to the ‘Downloads History’ part of the new XBox Experience Dashboard and re-download all previously purchased content. If you don’t do this, purchased content will not work when you are offline or attempt to access the content from another account on the same Xbox. Instructions on how to do this came with the replacement unit. This isn’t as daunting as it seems. You actually don’t download anything. All that seems to be downloaded is a new license. For each re-download, after 1% was downloaded, it showed download complete. it took only a few minutes to complete this process for all my previously purchased content.
• Temporarily Lost: Normally the replacement process takes just 2 to 3 weeks. My unit was temporarily ‘lost’ for two weeks during this replacement process. Two weeks after shipping the unit in, I received an email from Microsoft saying they hadn’t received the defective unit – though I had shipped it out that day. A dozen phone calls and a week later they found it on the Don Mills (Microsoft’s Toronto repair center) loading dock. Turns out the original person I called (at the 1-800-4-My-Xbox number) typed the serial number into the computer wrong so the serial number of my shipped unit and the serial number that they had on record didn’t match. This resulted in my Xbox being shunted to a warehouse shelf for two weeks until this was sorted out. At week 3 a manager was assigned to the case, called me personally, gave me number to call him back at personally, helped find it and worked with me to expedite the repair and return process. While the repair/replacement process took longer than usual, I was happy with the quality of service to expedite things once the lost unit was found.

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