Ever since the begining of the system, the console has been plagued with what we know as the Red Ring of Death. Symptoms are a useless Xbox 360 and out of luck. Microsoft is informing us on why the Red ring of death occurs and how they're fixing it.
Before Microsoft was ignoring the complaints, but now they're doing everything capable to fix the occuring problem.
Recently, Microsoft invested 1 billion dollars into the problem by using pre-tax charges profited from the system. This allowed them to upgrade every Xbox 360 owner's one year warranty to a full blown 3 year warranty and to investigate further into the Red Ring of Death.
What the Red Ring of Death means is that the Xbox 360 has fallen into a total system failure, and fixing it is out of the owners reach. Therefore the Xbox 360 has to be shipped out to a special facility somwhere in Texas, where you won't even see it for another month.
But recent observations from Console Modders (people who open up their consoles and start attaching new technology) have noted that the potential (but uncertain) cause maybe in the motherboard technology. The failure occurs in connections between the console's Main Processor and its Graphics Processor, and the 360's motherboard.
Inside the Xbox 360's outer shell, the motherboard is pinned up against the side, rather then being placed towards the middle like you would assume. So if you over heat the console (playing almost 24/7), or the console receives any hard hits or to much jostling, the chips on the motherboard will start to lift off causing the 3 red lights to appear and indicate there is a problem. Console modders have declared that if they fix this problem, that they can almost guarantee a red-light-free Xbox 360.
So if console modders have recognized the solution, why hasn't Microsoft? Microsoft has been doing their best to keep things under control. They recently have been modifying the internal hardware of the received broken Xbox 360s to avoid the problem, as well as the new Xbox 360 elites have the new hardware up dates.
But in the mean time, if your Xbox 360 experiences the Red Ring of Death, call Microsoft at 1-800-4MY-XBOX. They will organize a rescue for your system, with all fees covered.
