So why are your 360's out of warranty? From what you said both of them are less than 3 years old.

Maybe this is MS' way of getting you to buy a 360S? ;-p

Its usually too late when you get the red rings...

The 3 year warranty only covers RROD and E74. However as I am perversely honest I couldn't bring myself to RROD my console deliberately! :/

I guess they are trying to tempt me, but I was waiting for the Kinect Arcade so I could Frankensert the old HDD from my 60GB. Maybe they heard of my schemes?

well dont touch your rrod 360 for 2 weeks, it might work again. same thing happened with a friend. if you dont want to buy a new console id stick with ps3/pc/wii.

I dont understand why things like that never happen to me. Honestly no electronic device I bought broke in a way that I couldnt use it anymore. Ofcourse sometimes some buttons or the housing of the devices are due to heavy use optically damaged. 

Not one single Item I bought myself no matter how old it is isnt working anymore. Exeption are one GC Controller which I destroyed because it steered automatically in one direction.

All my consoles are working even my 20 year old GameBoy. If I buy something I dont even think about the possibiliy it could break. Because i expect it will work always and for decades like my tiny TV for 70 Euro cheapest china TV on the market. Its a CRT from a super market. It was running 24/7 for atleast 4 years and it still runs a lot. And it never failed it works like a charm. Like my 18 year old CD player.  Also I have several notebooks from the early nintys until now. And all of them work like on day one. And I am not careful with my stuff. 

I will buy a 360 soon. I wanted the Slim model. But maybe I have to buy the old one and put it into a bad ventilated shelf just to see if it really breaks on me.

Things like that happen it seems but not to me.

No, I would stick with just a PC, they seem the most solid. the PS3 has it's YLOD which always seem to strike out of warranty, and the WIi had the disc drive falures.

Thats quite the temptation really when I have two Phenom II Quad core machines with either a 5870 or a 5750 and 4GB RAM each respectively. But alas I am a whore who doesn't feel sane without all three home consoles at once. Maybe I will try to wean myself off this madness and maybe, just maybe the Xbox 360's dying has given me that chance.

Go to xbox.com and fill out the form for repair and report them as RROD.  I know several people that have done that and the repair was free, even people that did it after the 3 year warranty was over.  Doesnt hurt to try.

I'm sure you're going to get a new 360 so when you get one, then use protection. And I suppose it won't do any harm to do so with other consoles either.

Perhaps it's time to not buy the 360 anymore, all they do is break down anyways. Plus they lose all their good exclusive games, to where it only has 3-5 good franchises anymore. I don't like Mass Effect 2 all that much, but it was a nail to the coffin for 360 fans because they used that as a, nullifier to Uncharted. Just saying, don't keep wasting money. You should only have to buy one system from a single company, anymore than that in which you "have to", and you know it's not worth it. My 360 and 2 PS3's still work, but my 360 gets hardly any playtime so it doesn't get much chance to die. My Slim and fatty fun 24/7 sometimes for a week or two, and run like dreams. I wouldn't dare do that to my 360, plus 360 only has exclusives that are "good" that are FPS games, and I hate those more than anything. Games like Gears, and Halo I find disguisting.

But if you have to have a new one, than I feel sorry for you. MS doesn't deserve people buying their 3rd, and 4th systems, which I know a lot of people who've had too. I just am shocked tons of people support their bad quality. I am a computer guy, and I don't tolerate it. If my expensive ass PC went to shit, or my PS3, I'd be royaly pissed off, and I have no company loyalty to any companies, but just to myself.

But for you, I hope it somehow works, people shouldn't really have to waste money like this.