Tuesday afternoon a welcome sight arrived in my inbox:

"Good news, your Xbox console has been shipped! You can expect to receive it in 3-5 business days."

So it looks like it'll be about four weeks from making my initial call to Customer Support until I'll have a repaired 360 back in my hands. A week for them to mail me the box, a week for them to get the console after I dropped it off, a week for them to fix it and a week for it to be shipped back to me.

They say all their shipping is done via UPS 3 Day Select, but I think they need to rename that service. According to the tracking information on the UPS website, it took an entire day for UPS to pick it up and it only travelled from McAllen, TX to San Antonio, TX to Dallas, TX on day two. Expected delivery is now Monday, August 6th.

It would have been nice to get it back in time for this weekend, but I really can't complain since it will be back before any of the big games I'm anticipating are released. Of course that assumes I'm not getting a refurb unit that has something else wrong with it which will break the first time I put BioShock in to play. I've read too many horror stories of multiple console failures to really feel like my troubles are behind me.

My exhile from HD gaming is nearly over though. Soon I'll be back on Live and hopefully playing with you guys again.