My first 360 didn't even really get that much use and it still died on me. I bought it in Feb '08 after holding out for a long time because I had heard so many horror stories about the poor quality of the hardware. When the Falcon chipset was implemented and released I foolishly believed them when they claimed it would be a fix for RRoD. And after much debate I finally decided on the 360 over the PS3 because it had the games I wanted to play.
I'm as much as a hardcore gamer as I can be, but I honestly don't have a lot of time for gaming... I work 40-50 hours a week, play in a band, and have a relatively healthy social life, so I'm not someone that gets to game for hours on end every day. Back in June I rented Ghostbusters, put the game in, and found my controller wouldn't connect. Restarted the console and got RRoD.
The thing is, I hadn't played a game on the thing in over a month when it died. I had used it to stream media a few times from my PC, but hadn't done any gaming in quite a while. In the console's 16 month lifespan it usually got a few hours of use a week, with the occasional 4 or 5 hour sessions of COD4 (which I would say were pretty rare actually). I did use it for streaming media relatively frequently, but even that wasn't a ridiculous amount... and I would think streaming wouldn't be too hard on the system as it doesn't use the GPU or anything.
I guess my point is don't worry about it or live in fear, limiting your playing to try and avoid console failure... because even with less-than-average use the thing is likely to break at some point. In fact, you might be better off using it more so that when it does die it's still under warranty.
And, before the accusations begin to fly from the fanboys, my 360 is in a wide open space, there is no smoking in my house, the vents are not blocked, and even the power brick has plenty of room.
360's are awesome. They're great consoles with an incredible online experience and tons of amazing games.... but the hardware has probably the worst design in console history and as far as I can tell you're almost guaranteed to have a failure at some point. I don't personally know one person with a 360 that hasn't had to have a repair or replacement. And as far as the Jasper finally fixing it? Sure, heard that one before.
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