"On July 16 I ordered a refurbished Xbox 360 from Geeks.com for $200, roughly half the standard retail price. It arrived roughly a week later and immediately upon set up it was clear the console itself or the power supply was faulty as evidenced by the 'Red Ring of Death' (RROD, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_ring_of_death) a widely recognized failure mode of Xbox 360's.
I contacted customer support to obtain an RMA number. It was promptly provided but I was forced to pay the return shipping, $31 for ground shipping from Pennsylvania to California. The RMA was received and processed and a replacement unit shipped out and was delivered yesterday, 6-Aug-09.
Today, while playing Halo 3, a game not known for it's crashes, the console froze up, twice within half an hour, requiring a hard reset to become responsive. I will be contacting Geeks.com on Monday to take up this issue with them, but from what I can tell, they have deliberately been shipping defective product, scamming customers.
At this point I want a paid shipping label to return the clearly defective system as well as a full refund of my purchase amount, $199"
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Freezing is usually a prelude to a RRoD failure.
My dad got me a 360 for Christmas, used for about $150, manufactured 10/06. It RRoD'ed, I mailed it to MS, they refused to fix it because it had already been opened. So, I ordered some parts and opened it myself.
Inside, someone had done the pennies trick, reapplied thermal paste to the processors (sloppily), and added a second (fucking) fan(!). No wonder it sounded like a jet engine.
My guess is that some sucker bought it for Christmas, then it died. MS hadn't yet extended the warranty, so he sold it for parts for probably $50 or something. Then some jackhole "fixed" it, and sold it to my dad over ebay or something for a 30-60% profit (accounting for parts).
Anyway, I was able to get it running again by using a really straightforward fix that requires little more than taking everything apart and tightening a few screws. Trust me though, you don't want to go this route, because I've had to apply the fix three times already, and I generally can't play for more than 60-90 minutes without the game freezing and possibly RRoD'ing, requiring me to do the fix again (~40 mins).
My advice is to wait a few months and buy a new Arcade for $200, keep your HDD or get one separately, and attempt to trust MS that their new "Jasper" system won't have these bugs.
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