The RRoD is really a symptom of one thing. Heat. If you can reduce the amount of heat the system had to deal with, then you can reduce your chances of failure. The problem is there is no good way to know that your new fan does anything about the heat where it matters.

Another issue that I think people overlook with respect to the new SKU's, is a major factor of the RRoD is heating a cooling. It's not the constant heat that gets you, it's heating up and cooling down, over and over. This means every time you turn on your console, if it has build quality issues, you are contributing to it's failure. This is why the jury is still out on the new SKU's. The problem very well might be significantly reduced, but until enough time goes buy for people to cycle there units often, we don't know.

Oh, and @Magnific0, it's not just in the top 20, it is the highest failure rate of any mainstream piece of electronics ever produced. MadSkillz seems to think that's irrelevant, and would think us a fool for even considering it when we think about purchasing the product. I am not sure how he justifies that in his head.

I actually got the RROD as soon as I got my console home. I hooked it up and it RROD on me right away. So I called Microsoft, just to confirm i had everything hooked up properly. The tech support guy ran me through the steps and cofirmed my console was dead. However since I had just bought it from Walmart, I took it back and got a new one. No problems since and i have played quite a few 360 games. This was also early 07 so the problem was not yet so well known. I just thought it humorous that my first 360 experience was the RROD. I also seen it one other time, by friends died right after he moved.

The PS2 DRE was mentioned as well, quite a few of my friends experienced that debacle. Four of them have gone through multiple PS2's, and mine died a short time after i sold it to a friend. I also have a stubborn friend who refuses to replace his even though it wont play blue disks or dvd's and has some trouble with PS1 games. I don't quite trust Sony hardware after last gen.

5 of em

I work retail, and we've had 4 demo 360's RROD, and my buddy had his do it while we were trying to play WWE SVR 2008.

I've also seen many come into work with the less common "this system does not read non x-box games" error on legit games when I test to see if we can buy their system... 

WOW,

or people are lying ? or RRoD is just as common as dog in street and cat in house ?

Well the red ring is over-reported, but it is fairly common.

The reason that it is over-reported is that there are a variety of simple errors that occur that show up as red lights on the 360 that are not a problem other than a reboot - people see them and think they have RROD and freak out.  In fact there have been several reports from MS service that many of the "RROD" returns have actually NOT been RROD but the red lights in some pattern.  That's why they want you to have to call customer service  (versus an online form or somethng) to get the coffins, so they can talk you through it and make sure it is RROD before you send it.

The second reason I say it is over-reported is because you will always have 360-haters jumping on threads like this and claiming to see the rings or have had them when they haven't.  Just to be cool.  And we KNOW people do it and will do it. 

Clearly it is an issue though.  I have to say though that in the 2.5 years or whatever, I had to swap out my box once - as I saidin a previous post -but I went through 3 PS2's back in the day in the first 3 years I had it, and I went through about a dozen Atari 2600's WAY back in the day.  The only company that I owned that never stopped working has been Nintendo (NES/SuperNES/N64/Gameboy/DS). 

I had 3 PS2's that died on me last gen, and this gen I only had 1 360 fail on me so far. I have seen the TRL 3 times however. The 1st time was on my 360 and the other 2 were my cousins 360.

Personally? I've seen one 360 RRoD during a LAN party. I know of 2 others that RRoD'd, I was not present though.

Madskillz: so would you say it's likely that the PS2 DRE errors are much less common than the 360 RROD? I think most people would agree with that.

You have to realize with failure rates you typically look at stuff over the expected age of the product. So for the 360, you might look at failure rates over the first 5 years of its life, since it is expected to last five years. If the failure rate is more than, say, 5%, that's outside of the normal range for electronics. A 3% failure rate would be close to normal for the lifetime of a product.

That said, it's worth mentioning that I dug throught the Somethingawful "My 360 borked" thread a bit more, and noticed some failures from Xbox 360s purchased this year. In fact, on the first page of this very thread a user posted that he bought his 360 in December of 2007 and it failed a few weeks later.

People aren't lying. The machine is freakin unrealiable. MS set aside about 1.1 billion dollars, above and beyond their normal support costs, to deal with this problem -- do you really think they'd need that kind of cash to deal with something that isn't very common?

I just hope it gets fixed so I can stop worrying.