Well, our 360 is RRoD'd too... hasn't gotten back yet AFAIK, despite having RRoD'd, like, a month ago.

My CD drive made some really fun sounding whirring noises, and when I pressed the eject button, changed to some really fun grinding noises.

15 minutes, a screwdriver, and a paper clip later:

Hmm. My 360 has yet to be RRoD'd.

But I had to replace my PS2 a few times cause it got DRE'd. >_>

Well once we heard a small explosion at our house, followed by a barely hidden swear-word from my dad. We went to look to find my Dad trying to prise the CD-drive of our Dell open. It turned out that a disc had exploded into smitherines inside of it.

Now, our Dell was the very top of the range at the time (hence expensivest), and the CD was my Dad's favourite game - Star Trek. Dad was distraught, but he removed the CD-drive and spent hours upon hours removing every single fragment before putting the drive back into the PC. The drive still works, luckily. Evidently the game doesn't so Dad brought a replacement.

Me and my sister rejoyced at the destroyed game but were a bit put out when he got a new one.

*Anicdote about my RRoD expriences...*

Ok, now that's over, I will show Jin some sincere sympathy because GuitIar Hero 3 day is a big damned deal.

Dude... that sucks. Huge time. Hope you get it back swiftly so you can rock out some Devil Went Down to Georgia. *Patpat*

A friend of mine's sent his back to be fixed about five times now - I think it's been being repaired for a longer period of time than it's been at his house.

Hmz, my 360 has yet to RRoD.

Honestly, I was tempted to point and laugh, but I won't do that. Hope you get your 360 back soon, you're missing out on a fantastic game. =p

RAUGH STOP STOP STOP! Stop telling me about this game. I'm buying a house. I can't afford all these games they're puking out right now!

*mails his 360 to Jin so he can't buy GHIII*

~Tobe

**giggles** We get about 10 XBox 360s a day at the UPS store, and every time I see one, I jokingly ask "Hope they send you a Wii instead?"

As for technology crapping out when I need it most, there was one time I was voicechatting and all of a sudden, my soundcard shorted out. I freaked out and rapid-fundraised to get myself a laptop. It ended up fixing itself about two weeks later, but man I was scared. ^^; I ended up getting the laptop anyway, as my SPOCK (Stupid Piece Of Crap **Kills**) just wasn't keeping up with the times.

~Shadowed Spirit Sage

....

What does RRoD mean? o.o

*has a brother in law who owns an eleven-month-old XBox*

Red ring of death. It's caused by a hardware failure.

Probably named as such like BSoD (blue screen of death)

My day one GC was having disc read errors ~4 years in...

I've gone through two DS Lites... Both had the L-trigger go out, but both were under warrenty, so Ninty sent me replacement units before I had to send them back ... I now own a Black DS instead of a white one >>

My 360 had never RR...OH WAIT A SECOND, THAT'S RIGHT... BOSTON IS STILL WAITING FOR HIS UNCLE TO GIVE HIM THE 360 HE PROMISED BACK IN THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER >=

My 360 went out last november finally decided to send it in april or something like that. It hasn't messed up since; thankfully.

Huh, I remember my GC getting DREs as well... And our day-one Xbox, too... Our day-one 360 RRoD'd quite a while ago, and it's already returned; however, that's not the 360 I mentioned earlier, so.

Your DS Lites had L button problems too, Hiro? My original DS has an annoying lack of L-button sensitivity, I have to really mash it to get it to work.

Also, I've never had a game console fail on me. N64, original Game Boy (I had two original Game Boys, but I don't know why, as both of them worked. In fact, both of them still worked in 2003 when I sold them...), a launch Game Boy Colour, a Game Boy Advance, a launch DS, a PSP, a launch PS2, a GC, and a PS3 - none of them have ever failed.

However, BOTH of the PS/2 ports on my current PC have failed. My USB ports work, though, so I switched my mouse (which was using a USB-to-PS/2 adapter anyway) back to USB, and I bought a $30 USB keyboard (Pro: Backlight! Con: Not wireless. uu).

The ports themselves are no great loss, but I'm a little concerned about what ELSE in my computer might be failing. 😛

yeah... I think it's the way I put them in my pocket...

i'd never heard of a CD exploding in a cd drive before reading this.
*eyes her freind's computer, suddenly paronoid as it's power supply did explode 3 years ago* >>;

worst i had with a console was the dreamcast's annoying problem when it would suddenly reset itself. mine would do it frequently. ox;

while my littlest sister's gameboy looked like a brick, was as heavy as a brick and about as durable. it was held together with sellotape and still worked perfectly fine!

IIRC it had something to do with really really high speed drives (like, 52x drives) and old CDs (like, CDs made before the advent of 52x drives).

My gamegear's screen stopped working years after I bought it

But I never used it

I've got two 360's. Only one of them has RRoD'd.

But for us, it turned out to be an overheating problem because of the area we live in, so we just got the cooler things, and it fixed our problems right up.

That really bites. I hate when consoles go "frrrrp".

I had a Game Gear that completely died. Also a new model 2 Sega CD, which went out a couple months after getting it... lame, since I found a used model 2 and a model 1 that work great.

The big thing was a launch GameCube, which had to be repaired after rumble function died (free, since it was under warrenty). Worked for a while. Then I got Sonic Adventure XD, I mean DX, and it started giving disc read errors.
A Nintendo customer service rep just told me to buy a new one... o.o

D: @ Buy a new one... I sent mine in for the $50 repair...

The first one had its entire drive replaced and it was still freaking out, so I felt it wasn't worth fixing. And hey, I got a new GC with a free Game Boy Player. That thing was 50 bucks by itself. XD

Becca, I had a CD explode in the disc drive of my Thinkpad. Naturally, it took out the disc drive, too. I had to get on the phone to IBM Spain and explain my problem in Spanish. Turned out later I was actually talking to a dude in Scotland, where their entire EMEA service centre is based

I should add I was in Madrid at the time, it wasn't that I felt like having a talk with tech support in a foreign language

Oh, and a power surge took out the motherboard of my secondhand Saturn about 2 days after I bought it. The Saturn's still in the loft somewhere, if anyone nearby needs spare parts.

DW

I've had CD's explode in computers before. One was rather epic as it blew the front of the drive off and scattered fragments and piece of the 2kpro disc's holographic cover to the four corners of... the room.

~Tobe

Cheapass buttons on my 3rd party GCN controller lost the ability to pop back up after a press. I have to play upside-down. >=(

A few years back, my PS2 decided to mysteriously stop playing EA games...no really. It refused to read them at all for some weird reason...needless to say I had no issues but my brother did so we decided to get a new slim one...haha.

Mine died in April of this year, but I got it back before June. *crosses fingers*

It's done well since then. I keep telling myself that if it dies again, I'll not purchase another or send it in for repair on principle.

This will, of course, fizzle out when I see the games coming out that I want.

My dad's computer, which is the newest and best in the house keeps having hardware and software problems.. that thing had to have the mother board changed 3 times already (twice under warranty) and it still has problems from time to time.
The last time was at the beginning of October, when it shut off soon after having loaded Windows. While it has been fixed, we don't know why it was doing that in the first place.

Wow, 360 problems are worse than I thought. I was reconsidering buying a 360 before the 65nm chips come out, but I'm definately gonna wait, and if those don't help, I'll waste my money elsewhere.

Thanks for the replies. I wasn't really expecting this thread to grow like this.

Anyway, to make my story even that much worse, let me remind every one of you that I manage a GameStop store here in Wisconsin, and we were one of the many picked to do a midnight release of GH3.

GUESS WHICH OF THE STAFF HAS TO BE THERE?!

So, all goes well, and by 1am, we're out of there, and I'm driving home with the GH3 box in the back of my car, jamming out to some Dethklok CD on my 30 minute drive back home. I notice I'm running on empty, so as soon as I meet up with Zing, (who also works at a GameStop, and was also in for a midnight at the store she works at), as she's getting dropped off by her co-worker. I drive up to her and signal her to come down. She takes the game, (cuz she's like GIMME GIMME GIMME), and I tell her I'll be a minute, because I'm on empty, and I'll go fill up.

Doot dee doot doot, fill up, drive back. She meets me at the door as my garage door is closing with a worried look on her face.

"Well babe, I got you all set up and ready to go... but I got bad news?"

"... what?"

"Well... the 360 was skipping during the dashboard startup."

@#%!, this can't be good. Oh well, I kept it positive. Our 360 crapped out on us first in May (2 days into Halo 3 beta, 3 songs away from 5 starring all songs on Expert in GH2...), and we got it back in June, a new 360, so I'm thinking positive... couldn't be the 360.

Whatever, I sign in, grab my shiney new Les Paul, and start rockin' out to the first song in the first tier. 30 seconds in, what happens? FREEZE.

"Noooo no no no no." Shut it off, turn it back on, load back up, start song back up, freezes 10 seconds in. It's an EXACT FLASH BACK to how it died the first time, with GH2. Off, then on again... ... RRoD.

@#%!!!!!!!

So here I am, tired as balls, 2:30 am, with a $100 dollar piece of worthless wireless plastic in my hand and a $400 piece of plastic standing next to my tv, flashing red. Five months... not even FIVE MONTHS... augh.

While I'm thankful I don't have to spend money on it, (I bought MS' 2 year warranty, and with all their warranty extensions, I am practically covered for the ENTIRE life span of the 360), it's still a pain in the proverbial ass to come home and have my hopes and dreams crushed, especially when the next day was my day off.

Oh well, I had crap to do at home, what with unpacking and the such, anyway. Stupid storm windows. It'll be three to four weeks before I can rock out to GH3 and finish Blue Dragon.

This is all good to know before I get one for x-mas. o_O

Wow, Jin, I didn't know you managed one here in Wisconsin. There are 3 by me in a small area, lol. Well, 4 after they changed the name of the EB Games...

lol I love the EB/GS merger... I kid you not, there are at least 2 sets of stores that are now within a block of each other...

In Rockford, there is literally an EB and a GS across the street. And then I believe in Crystal Lake mall, there is an EB and a GS inside the same mall... go figure.

Now that I think about it, there was a Planet X (GameStop) and an EB inside Dolphin Mall in Miami, also. Hahahahah, that's funny... not to mention EB Games in The Falls, and the GS across the street from that... hah. It's the new Starbucks!

Nel, I manage one in south Wisconsin. I can't give out a location, obviously, but yeah. Bunch of stores down there: pick one!

I don't recall ever having any troubles with my consoles.

There's a Guitar Heroes 3 now?

Holy Penis, Hillary's running for President!?
Does Hannity know about this!?!

I'm in south Wis too, and our fourth GS makes it so that there's two in the same mall. o_O The Starbucks of gaming?

So, if I get a 360, I should be fully prepared for it to just up and kill itself, I take it? It's like these things are designed to break, from what I hear here and elsewhere. My roommate's been through two of them and lost a Guitar Hero game along the way.

Actually, no. Right now, all stores should finally have the 360 with the new Falcon chipset, a smaller chipset that is supposed to run quieter, and cooler, and supposed to fix many of the hardware issues... and so far, so good. There hasn't been many accounts of dead 360s yet with the new chipset. So, NOW is really a good time to possibly get a 360.

South Wis, too ,eh? What part, if I could ask?

ah... good old God's Country... How I miss thee, oh land were good St Vince would wander.

Woe am I, stuck in the land of the fair weather fans.

Ah, so I'm glad I waited.

Location is near Milwaukee-ish, but I'm elsewhere in the state for college, so... yeah.

Ah, I'm southererer than that. I'm like, literally almost 30 minutes from the IL border.

I'm more southern than you. :3

Bish, I used to be in Miami, Florida, and used to live in Venezuela. You can't get ANY southernerner than that. OHhhhh!

My PS2 was one of the first batch sent to the UK, and it lasted with barely a glitch until just a few months ago, when I got it replaced with another of the same model which is running just as smoothly. And the Sega Megadrive I picked up second hand from a friend (who had it for three+ years himself) has now moved on to my brother, and still going like brand new.

I do think that built-in obselecence is becoming a big thing in consumables now...objects that you buy purposefully dying just so you have to spend prescious green on a repair or replace. It's a cliche'd phrase, but so true: "They don't make 'em like they used to". That being said, I do have a Saturn that I got from a different friend which is very tempremental, choosing to work purely when IT wants to, rather than when I want it to.

One thing I have had a bad record with is pads...my PSX (which I've also had for a very long time and is still running strong, despite a gaping hole in the side where I dropped it) has gone through no less than 7 pads in it's time, and one of my PS2 pads has died in the D-pad about a year ago, meaning I had to get a new one. Maybe I'm just too heavy in the buttons...?

Memory cards are also a pain at times, however I find I only ever have problems with non-official ones. I have no less than 15 PSX mem cards, all unnoficial, and every single one of them has wiped at one point or another, some of them into unusabillity. The 5 official ones I have, however, including the one that the PSX origionally came with way back in the early 90's, are still going strong as ever, and I've never had a problem with them. I haven't even bothered risking unnoficial cards for the PS2...official stuff may cost more, but it's worth every penny on reliabillity.

ALWAYS go name brand over off brand when it comes to accessories, that's for damn sure. 2nd party at best, (ie; the Logitech PS2 and Xbox controllers).

Jin: Dethklock = F'n awesome. the only thing that got me to stop listening to that cd constantly was Serj Tankians new album.

Xbox: Well, the main issue for the ring of death is if you leave your xbox in the flat, or horisontal position. When it heats up, the board actually flexes and causes the processor chip to slowly wedge out, not to mention the weld spots can also warm up enough to allow some connections to wedge out.

But in any case, most of the time the cause is the processor chip being wedged out by the heating and cooling of the board in the horisontal position. I have an elite and i keep it in a well ventalated area on my desk in the vertical postition. Havn't had a problem yet, and i've been on for hours upon hours playing ace combat 6. liek you said though Jin, the new chipsets are probably in mine, so i'm doing well so far.

Yeah, I know about all that, duder. Mine is also (or was) in a well ventilated area. It had enough area to breathe. Funny thing is, this XB360 seemed to have the new heat-sync set that was going around before the new chipsets were placed in, as it was running A LOT cooler to the touch than my first 360.

My first 360 I could probably cook an egg and some pancakes on there for some great breakfast. The 2nd one was just warm to the touch, which I don't understand why warping would happen.

Oh, and hell yeah Dethklok rocks. Here's me jamming out to a
song I put together for Frets on Fire.

I've never heard this. o.o @ vertical position

Is that true? *would have had his 360 in a horizontal position, and very likely under his PS3* >>

Yes. 100% true.