My trusty, 2.7 year-old 360 Pro decided it had apparently had enough of the brutal gaming sessions my son and I have put it through these many, many months, and decided to take a sabbatical.
While playing a Halo Wars skirmish this evening, the screen suddenly changed from a beautiful, detailed rendering of Covenant forces bowing to the unstoppable force of my human army, to one of a human army getting their collective clocks cleaned by the Covenant in a blinding white snowstorm with areas of light blue and green thrown in for effect.
My son had just come downstairs and asked if he could play, and was puzzled to hear my forces screaming as they died horribly, their master (me), completely powerless to do anything to help as I couldn't see a darned thing except the slowly diminishing health bars of my troops. I told him the game seemed to be glitching, then I hit the Xbox button on my controller and the NXE window popped up and everything looked fine. So back to the game... still a losing battle in the middle of January somewhere in North Dakota.
I rebooted my machine, and beheld the dreaded RROD. No wait, it was only one segment... and the screen had a message in almost every known language but Klingon, informing me that my system had experienced the specific error "E 74" in large, Tron-like letters and digits at the bottom of the screen.
I did a little research, called MS, did the troubleshooting dance with someone named "Karen" (apparently this is a popular name in Mumbai), and found out that yes, indeed, we were having some sort of console failure, not an accessory failure, and would get to send the console in and for a mere $99 could have it fixed.
Okay... so the law of averages bit me and I got a non-3-segment error, i.e. - not covered by the warranty. But then I went to engadget.com and a few other sites, and it began to seem that MS might be pulling a fast one here. Hmmm... the number of E 74 errors have spiked dramatically since approximately the time the NXE was released. Could the NXE be pushing the hardware scaler (or other hardware) in such a way as to cause this failure to be more prevalent? Are the NXE avatars staging a revolt? Has MS changed the system software in the NXE to report a single flashing red segment for errors that used to result in three flashing red segments, thereby saving themselves a lot of money on the 3-year warranty? Is it all just a coincidence?
Now I need to decide if I really want to have my unit repaired or get an Arcade unit for $199. Here are the pros:
New Arcade: newer, lower-power motherboard, quieter/better DVD drive, brand-spankin' new 3-year RROD warranty, HDMI, can have the unit tomorrow, and it can use all my 360 Pro accessories (HD, headset, wireless network adapter, wireless controllers, etc.).
Repair of the older 360: half the cost of a new Arcade.
Seems like an easy choice, right? But the E 74 error doesn't appear to favor older consoles over newer ones, and what if I buy a new Arcade and get the same error in 13 months? Then I'm back at square one.
I didn't worry so much about RROD, because the warranty is very good when dealing with it, but the E 74 is only covered for 12 months and is beginning to look like a strong competitor to RROD, or the same issue disguised as something else. If I didn't like Halo games so much and have 30+ 360 games in my library, I would be tempted to switch to a PS3 (except for the cost... that's just too much to spend in this economy).
So I'm stuck without a good, clear course. Thanks, MS.
