Two weeks ago, I came home from a long day of school, looking foward to relaxing a little bit and playing a little Gears of War. Turn on my 360, open the disk tray, pop in Gears of War, and sit back in my squishy red recliner. Then, suddenly, that terrible disk read error pops up! "Unreadable Disk!". But, it's not that unexpected. My Gears of War has been a little choppy for the past month or so, and I've recieved that error every once in a while. I decide I'll just play something else. So I throw in Crackdown. Same thing. Call of Duty 3, same thing.

Now I'm worried. I take a DVD (Band of Brothers, disk 3 to be exact), and try that one. "Unreadable Disk". Just to make sure, I put in a couple more disks, try shutting down my console, removing the harddrive, all that good stuff. After about a half hour of dealing with this, I decide enough is enough. I call Microsoft.

I'm put on hold for what seems like fourteen hours, more like fifteen minutes though. A nice girl named Miranda picks up. She diagnoses my problem. I don't really remember what she says. I'm pretty surprised when she tells me there's a $140 charge to repair my console. Somewhat frusterated at this sound of this, I ask her if there's anyway around it. She asks for my 360's serial number. I hear her punch in a few numbers in a keyboard, and then Miranda says the magic words. "You have twelve days left on your warrenty!" I swear I've never been so happy to hear the number twelve. I ask her what the warrenty does for me.

Apparently the warrenty is very, very good for Xbox owners. Microsoft ships me a prepaid box. Not bad, I don't like to pay shipping and handleing. From the time it reaches Microsoft's repair shop, they have 48 hours to repair my console. Not bad. If they can't fix it within 48 hours, they send me a "temporary" Xbox 360, that I can use until mine is fixxed. I was happy to hear that I'd be getting MY 360 back, instead of just some refurbished POS. Microsoft also sends me one free month of Xbox Live to make up for my lost time.

I'm sure the message of this blog would be entirely different if I had to pay that $140 price tag, but I didn't. And I'm pleased with Microsoft, and this only makes me happier with them as a company.

Well, here goes nothing. The day, May 27th 2007, the time, 12AM (yes, exactly 12AM). This is my first blog entry on Gamespot, but I've been an avid reader of pretty much anything on Gamespot for a few years now. I'm not to sure why I've waited this long to make an account. Anyway, here's some stuff about me.

I'm a proud Xbox 360 owner, and Xbox Live member. I've had my 360 since Christmas of '05, and have been been in love with it since. As of right now though, I haven't played in 26 days (the exact number due to my account at 360voice.com). At one point I had considered buying a Wii, but decided against it after seeing that the only developer who was making any decent games, was Nintendo themselves. I guess the fact that I wouldn't be seeing an NHL game for Wii also ticked me off. As for PS3, I've never considered buying one of those cash-whores. I've heard the classic "BUT IT HAS BLU-RAAAAAAAAY!"  statement, but I just don't see the point in buying a gaming system for $599. I guess it's only fair to mention that I did in fact buy the 360 Core system, not the Premium. However, since then I have bought a used HDD.