Broken Dreams

So I spent about an hour and a half on the phone with a microsoft rep at 1-800-4myxbox this evening.The reason is that my Xbox360 is messed up and won't let me play Oblivion for more than 2-3 minutes without freaking out and freazing up(usually with all kinds of weird graphical anomilies and/or a pitch black screen).It has frozen up occasionallysince i bought way back whenever it was that I bought it(December maybe?I dunno),but never like this.Every single time I crank it up with Oblivion it messes up.

So the guy at Microsoft was very cool ,we walked me through all of their little troubleshooting procedures and I even learned a few things along the way.One of the things that I learned is that If you hold down the "A button " at the "Xbox360 logo screen" and continue to hold it until you get to the title screen of whatever game it is that you are trying to play then that will clear the cache on the HDD.There is also a way to reformat your HDD but he didn't tell me.Anyway after a series of trying different things we determined that the problem was in the hardware and therefore the system needs to be shipped to Microsoft to be fixed.

Now heres where the cool part comes in ,it is gonna cost me a total of $0.00 to have it fixed.Microsoft is even gonna send me the box to ship it in so I don't have to pay for shipping.Awesome.He said that 360's bought on launch day are still under warranty until 5/17/06.The reason this so cool to me is because I remember from my PS1 days how Sony deals with service issues like console repair and it sucks.So it's cool to know that even though there is a problem they are gonna make as painless as possible for me to have it repaired.Good stuff.