Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Don’t let anyone tell you that the November 19th Xbox 360 update is something you should be concerned about.  Heck, if anything, you should be eagerly anticipating it.

I won’t link to them because they don’t deserve the traffic but there is a rumor blog out there with a post claiming to have information from a “Microsoft customer service rep” that indicates that:

1. The famous November 19th Xbox 360 update – the “Dashboard Release” – could cause the “3 red lights of death” problem all over again for Xbox 360 owners throughout the world, causing an influx of support calls.
2. Microsoft is doing this on November 19th intentionally because the date is just beyond the “extended warranty period for launch Xbox 360s.

Regardless of whether or not this customer service rep is real or not, if you couldn’t already figure out on your own how colossally retarded these statements are, please allow me to point out a few things:

1. DASHBOARD != HARDWARE
   The ‘Red Ring of Death’ indicates a “general hardware issue” and is caused specifically because of hardware-related problems – not firmware or software issues.  The mechanics of why the 3 red lights appear are well understood by even the public at large and speaking as a Microsoft employee who actually has the diagnostics documentation and internal support material on the Xbox 360, this is just plain incorrect information.

   Now it is conceivable that “other” on-monitor errors could appear.  These are well documented as well however there is usually a way around these issues – again, via software (think ‘reformatting your computer’) – but none of this has anything to do with hardware or the ‘red ring of death’.

2. COVERED BY WARRANTY
   The ‘3 year Extended Warranty’ applies to all Xbox 360’s purchased starting from the date of purchase.  This means that when the Xbox 360 was released on November 22, 2005, anyone with an ORIGINAL first generation Xbox 360 purchased on launch day that somehow finds their system ‘suddenly disabled’ by the November 19th update will still be covered by the warranty.

   In other words, everyone that owns an Xbox 360 is covered by their warranty from failures on November 19th, regardless of whether it’s caused by the Dashboard update or by cosmic rays from the planet Zorganoth.