The Middle

I got my new Xbox 360, and it was good.

But after a few days, it was bad. After only 3 days of owning and using the console, I got a random This disc can not be read, please ensure it is the correct region for your console, or restart the console error in the middle of a PGR3 race. Uh-oh.

I rebooted, went back to my race, and continued on my way. Never did I experience a frozen screen or overheated power-supply. But a week or so later, I got another error, this time in the middle of my Browns giving the Steelers a sound thrashing in Madden 2006. Same thing, the dashboard screen sweeps in and accuses my disc of being the wrong region. So, I went off to the store and convinced a clerk to let me swap my copies for unopened replacements, blaming the two discs.

A couple of weeks passed, and the error didn't repeat itself. Granted, in all this time, I was playing more Geometry Wars and Zuma than anything else, but confidence was high that my 360 was A-ok. Finally, one night around Christmas, I got the error not once, not twice, but three times. Better yet, once on my second copy of Madden, again on my second copy of PGR3, and a third time on my freshly opened Kameo.

This was not a problem of bad discs.

So I called 1-800-4MYXBOX and talked to a lovely gentleman there who asked me to confirm that all my games were indeed NTSC. Check. My console is NTSC? Check. Alright, we'll send you a box, put in just the console and send it back. Now, the box did not come overnight, as some people on the net were claiming, but arrived in 2 or 3 days (New Years Day was in there somewhere, if I recall).

At that point, I sat on the box for about a week, because I needed to get in my fix before I left the country for a month, but did finally drop it off at the DHL shop on my way to the international terminal at RDU. Six days later, I got a return box from MS containing a new 360, with a new hard drive and a power supply thrown in to boot. They left me a very nice letter saying that to speed up the turnaround time, they had sent me a replacement 360 rather than repairing my disc drive, which is just what I had feared would happen.

Who cares, a box is a box, and you kept all your profiles/saves on the hard drive you still have, right? Not quite. Apparently, Bill and Co forgot to include "not screwing people out of functionality they've already paid for" when they designed the Digital Restrictions Management in the box.

Bottom line: Reasonable turn around time, no cost to me, freebie HD and power supply, and busted purchased content.