ureadit

It’s official. My Xbox 360 died for the very last time. My son was playing on it last Saturday night when it died. He didn’t say anything about it Sunday morning, but I knew something had gone terribly wrong. I suspected the Xbox was broken because my son woke up Sunday morning and actually spent some time with the family. After an hour or so, I finally asked him what was wrong with the Xbox.

He raised his eyebrows, perhaps surprised that I’d figured out something was wrong. “Oh, it’s giving me the E74 error message,” he replied.

“What’s E74?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders. “I looked online, and there’s no easy fix for it.”

“So I guess it’s really dead, huh?” I asked, with a voice solemn enough for a funeral.

“Uh huh. And I don’t think it’s under warranty,” he added. “Maybe we could try to fix it ourselves. I watched a YouTube video about it, and it’s not that difficult.”

Yeah, right.

I watched the YouTube video. Some guy in a thick Russian accent pulled apart an Xbox 360, re-seated a heat-sink and voila! The Xbox started working. Having been an electronics engineer twice as long as my son has been alive, I approached the Russian advice with extreme skepticism.

Historically, Microsoft had been repairing or replacing – for free – my Xbox as part of a warranty from December 2005, but that luxury exists no more. The warranty has expired. Considering that I had to return the box for repair a total of three times over the past three years, I guess you could say that I got my money’s worth from Microsoft’s service department. All the same though, I’d rather that the box not break down at all.

So now, no more free repairs. Microsoft will charge for the repair job. The cost, I’ve been told, will average about $150 to fix the E74. Also, I’ll have to pay for shipping the box to and from their repair center in Texas. So the total cost is about $190.

For all its flaws, Microsoft is a clever beast. They created a stripped down version of the Xbox 360, called the “Xbox Arcade.” It comes without a hard drive and with a minimal set of accessories. The cost? Take a wild guess. If you guessed somewhere around $190 you wouldn’t be far off.

So I can send in an Xbox 360, get the E74 error repaired and maybe I’ll be playing games in two weeks – all for $190. Or I can buy a replacement and move my hard drive from the broken Xbox to the new Xbox for only about ten dollars more. With the new Xbox, I get a renewed warranty, whereas the old Xbox only gets a 90-day repair guarantee. Also, the new Xbox comes with a wireless controller. I was thinking about buying one anyway.

Hmmmm … let me take about three milliseconds to consider buying a new Xbox Arcade or paying to repair the old one.

Walmart had ‘em in stock, so I bought the Xbox Arcade.

My son still wants to fix the old Xbox 360, and I can’t say I blame him. Being 14 years old, he has a healthy curiosity about how things work. We’ll probably take it apart this weekend and see if that Russian guy actually had a good solution. If so, then we’ll have two working Xbox 360s for a while … until one of them breaks down again.

Best,

Dan

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