It was about one year ago that I was in the same situation as I am now.  Yes, once again, the Royal XBox 360 is dead.

I was one of hundreds of thousands of poor saps who had purchased an XBox 360 that suffered the Red Ring Of Death and, just over a year ago, that console up and died a most inconvenient death.  Luckily for me, Microsoft was supporting this failure with a free repair.  Rather than repairing this particular console and sending it back to me, I was sent a refurbished console for my troubles.

This year, it’s another failure.  Of course, it couldn’t be another RROD which would be covered by Microsoft.  This year, I’ve got to deal with a disc drive that won’t read the disc.  The bill for this failure is going to be footed completely, 100% by the taxpayers of the NJLE.

I’m sure this comes as a shock for most people as Microsoft always provides quality products and genuinely cares about their customers.

Enter: the XBox 360S, Microsoft’s newest offering to the gaming world.  Supposedly, the heat and fan issues have been resolved with this newest console, making it quieter and increasing it’s life.  Well, one could hope that it would be longer than a year, anyway.

I’ve been seriously considering going out and buying myself one of these new consoles, transferring my data to it and then sending my old white, matte box off to Microsoft for repair before donating it to the youth of the NJLE.  That’s one of my current considerations, anyway.

What’s the other consideration?

The other thing that I’ve pondered is giving Bill Gates and his behemoth software empire a gigantic shove-off and buying a Sony Playstation 3.  Some of my favourite titles are available on the PS3 and it’s also got a Blu-Ray player embedded within it.  That’s basically putting gaming and HD movies into one package; a package that I don’t have yet.  I don’t necessarily want to buy a separate Blu-Ray DVD player.  It would be like killing two birds with one stone… or just killing Bill’s lame duck with a Sony slingshot.

I don’t know… I’ve got a few options, I guess.  Really, I just want to start playing Modern Warfare 2 again as quickly as possible.  That being said, I also don’t want to lose all of the progress I have built thus far on the XBox Live system.  So who knows.  There’s one thing that is for certain: I’m just pretty sick of funnelling money into the technological money-pit that is known as Microsoft.