Search the Web for "red ring of death" and you'll literally find hundreds of sob stories, all from Xbox 360 owners lamenting the respective crashes of their beloved gaming consoles. I'd seen plenty of these cautionary tales myself, but somehow, I thought my six-month-old 360 was immune; those telltale red lights around the power button—which warn of a general hardware failure, and an almost certain trip for your console back to Microsoft HQ for repair—weren't going to happen to me. And then, late last week, they did. Here's my story.

Remember that glowing preview I wrote about Guitar Hero II? After weeks of circling, my fiancé and I finally decided to cough up $100 for the game, and I couldn't wait to bring it home and get some licks in. Once in my living room, I cracked open the GH2 box, fired up my 360 and slid the new disc into the DVD tray. Within a few seconds, the Guitar Hero animations started up, and then I was prompted to download an update to the game, which I dutifully installed. So now the game is restarting, but the Xplorer guitar accessory that comes in the Guitar Hero box isn't turned on, even after I plug it into the 360. Hmmmm. Then, while I'm still fiddling, the music stops; I look up, and the screen is frozen. Uh-oh.

I'd never seen my 360 lock up before, so I take a deep breath, hit the power button, then hit it again—and that's when the dreaded Red Ring of Death appeared.

At this point, all those tales of woe from other 360 owners began flashing before my eyes, especially stories of lockups in the wake of the recent Guitar Hero II patch, which I'd just (stupidly?) downloaded. As I poured over the Xbox.com forums looking for answers, I tried restarting my console again and again; a couple of times, it booted up normally, only to freeze after about five minutes, while other times the RRoD reappeared.

Finally, I called tech support, and we went though the diagnostics that are all too familiar to other 360 Red Ringers: we cleared the cache on my Xbox hard drive, looked for disc errors, and then removed the hard drive altogether. Again, even without the hard drive attached, my console kept freezing. And with that, my tech support rep gave me a case number, took down my address, and told me to expect an empty, pre-addressed box in three to five days. Once the box arrives, I'll have to pack up my 360 and send it back to Redmond, where it'll stay for about 10 days for repairs.

I have to say, I was surprised by the depth of my despair. No Xbox for the better part of a month! No Guitar Hero, no battling zombies in the mall, no surprise chainsaw attacks, good-bye GRAW 2. This was my worst technology meltdown since the hard drive on my Apple PowerBook G4 died early last year, without warning (luckily, I had a backup, but I went Mac-less for more than a month).

The good news is that my 360 is still under warranty, so the repairs are free (Microsoft recently extended the warranty from a measly 90 days to a full year); also, Microsoft agreed to send me a loaner Xbox 360 Elite so I can keep testing games. Still, that's little consolation for those Xbox gamers who don't get the luxury of loaner consoles—or who must fork over $139 for out-of-warranty repairs.

So, is the Xbox 360 just a buggy console? Was the Guitar Hero II patch to blame? Or was I just one of the unfortunate three-to-five percent of tech owners who inevitably gets hit with a hardware failure? Hard to say. I hear "Red Ring of Death" horror stories all the time (my fellow blogger Chris Null just wrote about one of them), and Joystiq has an interesting piece about a recent spate of 360 failures among the gaming media, which may (or may not) point to a wider problem. However, until we get some hard numbers that point to a clear trend, we're stuck with anecdotal evidence only.

In the meantime, my best advice is to hang on to your receipts—be they for your Xbox 360 or any other big-ticket tech items—so that if your gadgets bite the dust, you can prove that they're still under warranty (if, indeed, they are). Also, if you make a big enough stink with customer service, you may indeed get a loaner console or some other perk. Remember: those customers service reps can't hang up first, so stay on the line and be polite, but persistent.

Related:
Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death visits Weekly Geek Show [Joystiq]
PS3 Kills Xbox 360, Literally [Yahoo! Tech]
The Red Ring of Death [TeamXbox]