My Xbox 360 has been in perfect working condition for the two years I have had it. I've never had it freeze, get the RROD or anything else go wrong. Yesterday is when things went wrong. I watched a streaming video off of the marketplace, and after it finished and went to the dashboard, one portion of the screen started to have black squares flickering in a perfect rectangular shape across the screen. I wriggled the cables around on the tv and the back of the 360 and the squares remained. I could still see everything at this point just with the black squares covering some of the picture.
Then things got worse. I unplugged everything including the hard drive, then plugged it all back in and turned it back on. To my surprise the console did not load to the dashboard, and instead brought up a screen with all foreign languages that say something along the lines of "system failure, contact Xbox support." Underneath that it says E74 in large letters.The bottom right light is red, not RROD because only one solid light comes up. I looked up some stuff, and some people say it is a GPU failure.
This is where things get strange. Even though it is a different problem then the RROD, I tried the towl trick and it worked. I wrapped it up and twenty minutes later it shut down from heat so I unwrapped it and it went straight to the dashboard with no problems when I turned it on. The squares were gone, everything looked as if nothing had happened. This happened yesterday, and everything worked well for 24 hours with games and music on my Xbox just like normal.
I just popped in GTAIV and within 5 mins the screen turned all green during the game. I could still see parts of the game like the map but everything else was all green. I pushed the Xbox Guide button and it popped up over the green screen in perfect clarity!! Nothing green over it at all, and pushed Y to go back to the dashboard and the squares are back. I restarted the console and now it only boots to the E74 screen.
I always hear about the RROD on Gamespot and never this. Has anyone ever experienced this E74 problem? I hear it will cost $150 to get Microsoft to fix the problem but I will demand they fix it with the 3 year warranty for RROD issues. I will post how that goes, but they have to be held responsible for making a console that fails even with the excellent care I take of my console. I have always thought that the 360's massive failure rates were because of misuse by the users, but this proves to me that you can get a problematic console even if you take great care of it.
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