Chronicling the Xbox 360 Repair Process: 4 years in

Most of us have been through this at least once; you settle in for a night of gaming, hit the power button remotely via your controller from the comfort of your couch, and nothing comes on the screen! You gasp and jump out of your chair, fly over to your entertainment center, only to be met by three red lights in that evil grin you know all to well. You vainly attempt to power cycle, unplug, and re-plug, but those horrid lights still shine true. If you’re an uber techie, you may go grab your Torx drivers and solder gun, pop the hood, make a few corrections, and go back to the couch, problem solved; however, if you fall in with the rest of us, the warranty mongers, the guys that don’t want to break that seal for fear that our precious entertainment device will never work again, it’s time to submit your repair.

As my primary unit “red-ringed” last night, I was irritated, but not overly so, as this past year, we picked up a second Xbox console for our upstairs, allowing me to, albeit adding some new connections to my TV schema, connect the original launch console refurb in place of my Falcon unit. This is the third time I’ve sent a console in for repair since first purchasing a 360 in July of 2006; twice for the Red Ring of Death (RROD), and once for a disc drive that kept sticking. As before, I placed my call to 1-800-4MY-XBOX, and talked to a foreign call center worker. He processed my repair efficiently, and stated that if I logged on to Xbox.com/repair, I would be able to print out my UPS label for shipment to the repair facility. I grilled him as to why they no longer send out pre-paid labels with boxes, but he had no answer for me, other than “It’s no longer policy.” After reflecting upon this, I was able to ship my unit off for repair the next day, as opposed to waiting for the box to come in the mail, so I suppose there is an upside to the new policy. I was pleased to find out that I could’ve done all this myself through the automated system at Xbox.com without going through the hassle of calling the support center, simply by registering my console on the site, and hitting the submit repair button.

After getting my repair submitted, and my label printed out, I headed to the local UPS Store to have my unit packed and sent off. The clerk was very friendly, and once he saw what was in my hand, he knew what to do without me even having to explain. He pulled out a quick reference scan chart for the register, scanned it, and stated that they process so many Xbox repair orders, that they stock the specific box and packing that Microsoft uses to ship your unit back to you when it’s repaired. Curious, I asked him how many repairs he ships out; he stated five or six…per day! I couldn’t believe it, I thought this issue was under control! No wonder we now have to pay for our own packing materials ($11.50 plus tax to be exact). Today is October 3rd, let’s see if the slated two to three week repair period rings true. It used to take up to four weeks, so at least they’re getting more efficient.

I’ll update as I watch the repair process on Xbox.com (also a new feature).

UPDATE: Post repair thoughts

Apologies for neglecting to give an update as soon as the repair process was complete; I honestly expected my console to be out of service a lot longer, thus having time to blog about it being gone. The online repair area at Xbox.com is very slick, and allows you to avoid those irritaing calls to foreign customer service representatives. I was also pleasantly surprised to see my total down time come out to be about only two weeks (13 days actually): one week shipping time, a weekend of repair time, and about 4 days to get back to me. I still was given a one month Xbox Live card to compensate for my repair time, so that is one nice feature that Microsoft has had for a while now that helps to soothe the irritation of the whole ordeal. In summary, it sucks to have a console go down on you, but the repair process has improved ten fold since the last time I had to get involed with it.

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