It was a beautiful Saturday Fall afternoon in New England. Spent the morning mowing the lawn and cleaning up leaves, while enjoying the great weather. Took a break to play some Guitar Hero: Van Halen on my Xbox 360, and things suddenly went wrong…

…first, I realized that someone had been spinning around the cymbals on my Guitar Hero drum set, which caused the wire on the yellow cymbal to sever. Oh well, no drums today, I’ll just play guitar and fix the drums another time. No worries, right? Wrong.

I fire up the game, and all started fine. After taking minute to adjust the guitar strap and power the guitar on, I look up to a screen with pixelated lines running through it. Hmm, did my LCD just start to die? I sure hope not. Then I noticed that some Xbox Live friends were signing in (thanks to the notifications at the bottom of my screen). The odd thing, the notifications were not pixilated, just the game screen. I thought, ok the TV is fine. Is my game disc scratched?

So, playing the Help Desk guy, I powered off the box and back on. Same thing. Well, it’s ugly, but playable. I played some Panama and Eruption. Then, decided to troubleshoot again. Turned off the Xbox and back on.

What did I see, 1 Red Ring on the Xbox and “System Error” “E74″ on my TV screen. You know, the newish version of the Red Ring Of Death.

I’ll be honest, I actually expected to get through the entire Xbox 360 console life cycle without ever seeing this error message. I am a late adopter to the system, having purchased my system in May 2008. My actual system was manufactured in March 2008. It just seemed obvious to me, that three years after the initial release of the Xbox 360, Microsoft had figured out their hardware woe’s. Well, I overestimated Microsoft.

Fortunately, the warranty (although officially expired at the end of May 2009) is automatically extended for E74 errors. Within 30 minutes, I was on the Xbox support website, printing a pre-paid shipping label, and packing up my Xbox for shipment to the repair facility in Texas.

I’m expecting within the next 14 days to have my Xbox back, and I’ll be ready to fire up some Lego: Rock Band by then.

Microsoft, great software developers, horrible at hardware implementations.[ad#post-banner-ad]