Aaargh!  My Xbox 360 suffered from some hanging in COD2 over December... and after resetting a couple of times, the dreaded 3 red lights of death... so I logged a call with Microsoft.  Their call centre rep suggested removing the hard drive and trying to restart it - and it seemed OK.  I didn't believe it at first - seemed like a cop-out to me, but it really did work... for a week or so.

 

Following that, even DVD's would hang.  And then just constant 3 red lights of death.  Logged another call with Microsoft and was advised to send it back... no worries I thought, but not over Christmas - knowing my luck the repair centre in Sydney (Regents Park) would be closed over the break.  Bugger that, especially since I was getting Rainbox Six: Vegas and Gears of War for Christmas.  I couldn't wait for it to sit in a repair shop over Christmas!

 

I read about the towel trick and I can't bloody believe it - it has WORKED!  So far... Tried it on Christmas Eve and it seemed ok.  Since then I've played several 3 hour sessions of R6V without crashing.  I've also repositioned the box so it sits horizontally and on a couple of rubber feet - better airflow you see.

 

I'm still going to send it back for repairs, but at least it's getting me through the Christmas season OK.

 

At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft fanboy, I think it's good that they've got a pretty efficient (sounding) support and repair process in place along with the fact that they are back-dating warranties in the US.  Here's hoping that the repair/replacement works out OK.

 

On a further note, it sounds like the call centre is in the Philippines, based on the accents of the support staff.  Slight American twang in the voice.  A bit different to the usual Indians-attempt-to-sound-like-Aussies call centre.

A customer "accidentally" upgraded to Patch 6.2 recently and the install must have gone awry - lost all patch tasks and related info.  Got them back up and running after cleaning out patch then manually upgrading from 6.1 to 6.2

 

NOTE: It's really important to run the upgrade checker FIRST!  Since the customer did it all via the solution centre, they probably didn't do this.  Of course, the customer is not admitting to performing the upgrade - "It just happened!"  Sure!

 

We're running it internally here and it seems much better than 6.1 - new features such as revisions and so on, along with the ability to have it automatically backdate changes.  Not sure whether that means that old patches will reinstall, or just install differently on remaining PC's.

 

So far so good however.