Inevitablility

Well, finally summoned up the courage to turn my Xbox on last night, and after 15 fruitless minutes attempting to get a picture to appear on my TV was finally rewarded with... the red ring of death.

This did not come as much o a surprise (see below), and in some ways as a relief, as it means I may get to properly play Halo 3 soon. That said I'm not a natural optimist, and any process involving both the postage of large, bulky items AND reliance on a major corporation fills me with ennui.

Musn't grumble though, at least it's not the dead end that the death of my Xbox original was. Anyway, for therapeutic reasons have decided to record the return process as it happens.

STEP 1: Registering the fault.Actually pretty painless. Because it's now standard policy thre's an online check-in process (which even excess for non-warrantied repairs if you've got to pay) all run through the Xbox website. Spookily Microsoft knew my 360 was out of normal warranty on the basis of my serial number, even though I don't remember registering it to begin with. Also a brief text explanation of how the fault came about was required. This gave me the chance to vent about Halo 3's murderous attack on my console, so I felt better about that.

REceived the confirmation email over night. This gives me shipping labels and drop-off instructions. It's all being done through UPS thank Christ.

One remaining problem is what, exactly, I have to send back. Basically I'm very reluctant to risk losing all the data on my hard drive, so really don't want to include that in the package.