The 360 is known for being a somewhat unreliable piece of hardware. I've managed to avoid the dreaded red ring of death but I've started to have an issue where some games (and only some games) freeze.
It's possible that it's a dvd drive related issue (as arcade games never ever crash, and it doesn't seem overheated or suffer from any known overheating errors), but it's odd that 2 games I have problems with (Grid and Street Fighter 4) are brand new disks in good shape, and some games that work fine (GH3 say) are older with more scratches. Furthermore, SF4 doesn't crash if the hard drive isn't plugged in so I'm unwilling to diagnose a DVD drive problem in that case. And copying games to the hard drive doesn't help at all in any of the cases.
So the problem is hard to diagnose accurately. My 360 is definitely out of warranty though, except for RROD, which I don't have. So I'm not sure what to do. The options are:
1) Buy a new arcade Xbox for about £100 and use my old 20GB drive. This works well but costs me £ with an outside chance that the 20GB drive I'd use has a fault contributing to the errors I'm seeing.
2) Buy a whole new Xbox (60GB) for around £150. More £ but safer.
3) Send it back to MS and pay them to fix it. I think it's a fixed price of around £60. I'd be a bit suspicious they'd reliably pick up all the issues as it seems a complex case and I don't really want to faff about.
4) Send it back to MS and claim intermittent RROD and hope they fix the problem for free.
I'm kinda leaning towards 4) with 2) as a backup if it backfires. What do people think?
It's possible that it's a dvd drive related issue (as arcade games never ever crash, and it doesn't seem overheated or suffer from any known overheating errors), but it's odd that 2 games I have problems with (Grid and Street Fighter 4) are brand new disks in good shape, and some games that work fine (GH3 say) are older with more scratches. Furthermore, SF4 doesn't crash if the hard drive isn't plugged in so I'm unwilling to diagnose a DVD drive problem in that case. And copying games to the hard drive doesn't help at all in any of the cases.
So the problem is hard to diagnose accurately. My 360 is definitely out of warranty though, except for RROD, which I don't have. So I'm not sure what to do. The options are:
1) Buy a new arcade Xbox for about £100 and use my old 20GB drive. This works well but costs me £ with an outside chance that the 20GB drive I'd use has a fault contributing to the errors I'm seeing.
2) Buy a whole new Xbox (60GB) for around £150. More £ but safer.
3) Send it back to MS and pay them to fix it. I think it's a fixed price of around £60. I'd be a bit suspicious they'd reliably pick up all the issues as it seems a complex case and I don't really want to faff about.
4) Send it back to MS and claim intermittent RROD and hope they fix the problem for free.
I'm kinda leaning towards 4) with 2) as a backup if it backfires. What do people think?
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