So we get home from running errands this afternoon, and I power up the living room television to play some Gears of War with Bret.

I boot up the game and I can’t connect to his already in-game progress. I cuss his stupid router and it’s inability to retain the PnP setting. Then, I’m about to create my own game, when there’s an audible pop. At first, Amanda and I thought our freaking DLP bulb died, or something along those lines.

I power down the TV, then power it back up then switch to the HD TiVo. Everything looks fine there. So I power down the Xbox 360, and then boot it back up. It freezes at the main screen. A couple more reboots and it keeps freezing on the boot screen. Then, I get the dreaded three red lights on the front of the console, meaning hardware failure! No!

So, we hop on Xbox’s web site and find my console is out of warranty. But with all the hardware failures, there’s a good chance that its repair will be recovered. So we call up Microsoft’s warranty department and the barely-speaking English customer service walks me through booting up a couple more times, still with various lockups on the boot screen, and an eventual set of red lights. *sigh*

So Microsoft is sending one of their pre-paid boxes to ship my 360 off for repair. Sucks ass. I hope it’s a quick turnaround on the repair, and thankfully, it’s covered. I wonder how long it will take before I’m going through withdrawl?