The Technical Term is "Shit The Bed"

My XBox started randomly locking recently -- the first time was after I created my Dood in Oblivion and spent ages getting his appearance just so, broke out of jail, carefully leveled up in those stinking shit pipes (wait, there was a way out through the door that the bigwigs went through? Why did I chip out through the walls behind that poster? Why did I crawl, gagging and crying through the soil pipes?) and as I emerged into the graphical beauty of the out doors_*! LOCKED.

Bastard. Lost the lot. After that it locked upon boot, and after a bit of fiddling about it gave me the Red Ringer, this close to Christmas, six months old.

Nice one.

Yeah, I know, it's happened to you guys, and yeah, I know call Game and get them to swap it, but it's a hassle.

Called Game, and they were really good about it -- the Perry just told me to take it in, straight swap, leave off all the gubbins, so I did. Not a straight swap though.

When I got it home, the first thing I noticed was that the HDD was still connected! Bonus! I attacked that with my torque6 and torque10 drivers and now I have a bare 2.5" SATA HDD waiting for the USB2 enclosure to turn up from Amazon. That puppy is getting plugged into the Mac Mini and is gonna be velcroed to the back of the TV as a Recorded TV drive.

Next thing I spot is the built in HDMI port! Checked the code and it's a 65nm one, that makes virtually no fan noise at all and from what I see online, is immune to the Glowing Red Sphincter Death.

Game has these bad boys in stock and they're not checking the 'dead' ones. Just saying.