Whoever's idea it was to put the xbox 360 on the top of 2 soft peices of foam and call that a secure protection for shipping should be shot, or at least fired. Like anyone in UPS or FedEx gives a rats ass about proper handeling of mail. Jesus christ, every system in the history of systems had better shipping protection.
I get three red lights on the "ring of light" described by MS as "a general hardware error". Just stupid. Here's my experience, and some advice on how to "correct" your problem.
So I reserved my platinum box up at Wherehouse Music. I was first on the list. Hell yeah, I was gonna get my xbox 360 at midnight, go home and jam it till I passed out with the wireless in my hand.
I started up the console on my VGA monitor and proceeded through the initial setup. Finishing up, I was ready to play PDZ and jam my ass off. I pressed A on the "open disk tray" and the damn thing opened a cm and shut back. "What the hell.." I was pissed at this point, but after a few openings and closings I realized my dumb ass still had the sticker accross the eject and tray parts. I removed the sticker, opened the tray, and went to put in PDZ.
Knowing the effects of keeping the PS2 upright, and the laser issues that would follow, I decided to tip it over onto it's side before placing the game in. I turned it over, placed the disk in the tray, and looked up to the screen to play. A black screen stared back at me.
I noticed I had unplugged the vga cable from the back of the box. I plugged it back in to get a grey screen of vertical lines. I figgued, hell, the damn thing can't handle the cable being unplugged, so I restarted the console. All that I got to greet me was 3 red leds blinking on the "ring of light".
I'm completly knowledged about the first M$ box, and knew that this wasn't a good sign at all. "You've got to be kidding me." I said.
Hours of sitting on the phone to MS passed by as I constantly unplugged and pluged everything in, trying different combinations of things, and still unsuccessful. My hommie said to me, "Give it a good slap." Reluctant to hit my 400 dollar peice of "top of the line" gaming equiptment, I attempted other methods to get the thing back to working condition.
After speaking with a M$ representitive (aka dumb ass) and filling out a service request, I hung up the phone furious. I set the xbox 360 upright, and slapped it with both hands simultaniously on either side. Powered it up, and played PDZ for a few minutes without a hitch. The enevitable glitch returned and I attempted the slam again, and got it back to working.
So for those of you with a 3 red led error, waiting for the return shipment box to appear, I have to offer you a temporary solution. I call it the "DK smash" as it's similar to Donkey Kongs forward smash move on SSBM. Slap the xbox with both hands on either side of the box before powering up to (I guess) realign the gpu, or whatever the hell is broken/not working inside the stupidly created case.
Who the hell makes a concave case for computer hardware? A mobo isn't concave.. What the hell do you expect?
I blame this issue on three things.
1. Rediculus packaging.
What the hell were they thinking, that nothing was going to get dropped, or slammed, or stacked, or any of the normal mailing proccesses that occur everyday?
2. Manufacturing mistakes.
Whatever machine they used to press the gpus, or whatever the hell is coming loose needs to be recalibrated, because this is just the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life.
3. Over heating
The beast works for a while after the slap because the gpu or whatever gets stuck back where it's supposed to be untill it heats up and get's missalligned again. I remembered back when the first 360 vid came up on ourcolony.net, J. Allard said something about water cooling. What the hell happened to that?
So yeah, untill your box comes in the mail, try the DK smash, or the DK bongo approach by beating the thing like a pair of bongos. That seems to get it going too. You may be reluctant to beat your machine, but hell, once I got that repair order in, I'm kicking the shit out of it to play the games.
Oh yeah, the god damn thing scratched my PDZ too. When are they gonna fix stupid shit like that?
