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Those of you who are devoted to the Xbox and have owned one for a longish amount of time probably heard about “The Red Ring of Death.” It was a hardware failure that happened to so many Xbox consoles that Microsoft, faced with hordes of gamers with flaming torches banging at their castle’s door, had to address it by adopting a 3-year warranty protection covering this bothersome malfunction.

An interesting story can be found on www.consumerist.com. A gamer, just like you and me, interested in simply enjoying games on his Xbox 360, had the misfortune of encountering “The Red Light of Death”, another hardware malfunction, only it’s not one that doesn’t seem to occur that often. Instead of involving the 3 red lights of “The Red Ring of death”, we’re now talking about a single, red flashing led. Of course, the guy called Tech support right away, only to be told that the warranty actually doesn’t cover it and he must pay to have his console fixed. Even worse, he had to live without his Xbox for an entire month. Legally speaking, Microsoft is right, the extended warranty only covers the "3 red lights" situation.

Still, this seems rather unfair. They say they cover the Red Ring of Death, which is “a general hardware failure” and they call the Red Light of Death by the name of Error 74, which “occurs when the Xbox 360 console experiences a hardware failure”.  So you see, in their opinion, Error 74 is a specific failure, while the red Ring of Death is a general issue. But doesn’t the Ring of Death mean lots of “specific failures”? Sheeeeeesh! Don’t you just hate this kind of double talk?

You’ll find some useful advice about how to deal with this kind of thing on consumerist.com: for instance, you can try to call the Xbox escalated support line, or the Tier 3 escalations, or just send an email to an executive or even higher. The idea is to make lots of noise so the PR guys at Microsoft become worried. Only then this will be over and Xbox gamers will sleep easily at night (when they’re not playing Gears of War, that is).