My Personal Red Ring: Xbox 360 - Error 74

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land
Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane

I was playing Fallout3 (see my Dogmeat rantamble here), and after clearing out a cave of Raiders and getting to looting the place and taking a nap, everything went Matrix on me, but red, and with lots of dots instead of the green characters. Ghosts of the action before me still remained, but none nearly visible enough to continue. Woah! I reset.

Then the flashing red light you see above. But hey, at least it's not the Red Ring of Death! Right? Wrong. MS places it straight:

While the majority of Xbox 360 owners continue to have a great experience with their console, we are aware that a very small percentage of our customers have reported receiving an error that displays “E74” on their screen. After investigating the issue, we have determined that the E74 error message can indicate the general hardware failure that is associated with three flashing red lights error on the console.

So my error and my "Oh, at least it's not the ring!" are all for nothing. And by "majority" they apparently mean "more than 50%." My research shows Microsoft is busting out repairs on an extended 3 year warranty for a possible 30% of customers who purchased an Xbox 360.

So you give me a free shipping label to fix a problem you KNEW about when I bought your system? P'sha!

I'd like 5000 points to go with the fact that I have to ship my system to you to get fixed, leaving me without the product I purchased.

Microsoft, you are a douche. And you're short-selling your clientelle. And you need to make amends. Even now, when the fervor of the red ring has died down, it still lives. It lives in every box that has been purchased. Even though you put out your statement in 2007 that you made changes, you're still sucking something hard because obviously the purchase I made a year ago was not iron-clad to your supposed changes.

This is bad business. I'll post it on my other blog too.

And I'll send in my Box with box and packing that I must pay for. And I'll call customer service every single day to find out when I'm getting it back and what credits I might expect.

I'll report back.

And my daughter just bought me Dead Rising. And even if I could play it, I just found out I can't read any of the text in the game: was optimized for HD.

Asshats. I'll let you know.