If you were to turn in a 20GB unit today to Microsoft, that RROD'd, would you get back the older unit or a newer one, with more reliable designs inside?

Depends I think, though I don't know on what.

I've heard of people getting their original machine back and then I've heard of people getting machines with HDMI ports back when they didn't have one before.

And on a somewhat related and interesting note-- my dev kit RRoD'd yesterday. >_>

Twestern, since you have a dev kit, I have a question for ya.

I have an affinity to use Singletons in my code, but most of the example game code I have seen all use statics instead.  Is there a large enough speed difference for me to change my ways?

Yeah...I'm a level designer.  I don't have a clue what you're talking about.  :-p

I am messing around with XNA and programming for speed in games is a lot different than programming for ease of mainainance and quickness of completion as in the business sector.

Just thought I'd ask.

The best way to find out is to benchmark it yourself. Make two simple equal programs using each approach (as similar as possible otherwise), run a few method calls in a loop with a million iterations and measure the CPU time taken. Most  languages have a way to do time measurements and print the timing out.

I had two systems RROD on me and every time they sent me a new system every time. good thing that last one they sent me still works

It is a little different when running things on the 360.  I will have to check out how to log things when debugging on there.  There also isn't a way to profile the 360 runtime either I do not think.

Just because something runs one way on the computer, does not mean it will run that way on the 360.  The compilers are very different.  I was just gonna ask a quick question so I did not have to do any work myself.

As long as you can get the program output out of the 360, you can also get whatever timing information you print. I get your point though.

I would imagine that it depends on what Microsoft has on hand. The later you send it in, the more likely it is that they'll have only newer models on hand, and thus you will get a newer model. It's a safe bet that they will clear out older models first, but nobody knows how many of those older models they have at any given time.