the one about the “three red lights”…
November 30, 2008 by Dennis Amith
On November 30th, after playing a fun session of “Guitar Hero III” and wanting to check out some of the games I purchased during the “Black Friday” sales at various game stores, I run into the three red light error.
For a half hour, I kept trying to see if it was something that can be restarted and maybe it need to cool down. But the red light persisted. I called Microsoft and customer service was very helpful (and no, I didn’t bring up the…”Hey are you from the Philippines, I’m Filipino as well” conversation piece I seem to have with most call centers that I am on the phone with).
Anyway, the lights came on and when I restarted it…my XBOX 360 started working again. So, I told her “thank you” but it appears its working fine.
So, I start up game and next thing you know…a minute later, it crashes. I restart the XBOX 360 and again, red light error.
Call up again, talk to another kind person at customer service and explain the problem and this time we went through the look at lights, unplugging and plugging the wires back in and red light error. So, she started processing the info., I turn off the XBOX 360 and sure enough, it starts working again.
But to make sure things are OK, she kindly waits while I put on a video game and sure enough, it crashes…three red lights.
So, after dodging the “three red lights” for two years or so, I now join the others who have had this problem and will be without an XBOX 360 for awhile. It sucks for this to happen during the Holidays but it happens I guess. XBOX 360 customer service was very kind and easy to work with, so I’m glad this experience was much better than others. But we’ll see how long it takes to get it back. Hopefully before 2009.
Note: This is not my image but someone else’s image of their XBOX360 three red lights.
It happened to be before. Once it happened, I went to Costco to buy one for the time being, waited for the replacement one to come back, then I returned the one from Costco (Even tho it’s open, they still took it).
Problem when you get your replacement though, if you had any downloadable content that were bind on the box, you might have to download them again.
What’s worse is if you have multiple accounts on the old Xbox, say, you have one account and your wife has one, but let’s say all the online purchases (e.g. arcade games) were bought from your account. Since your wife was using the same box, she could access the games because it’s on the same box even though it’s bought by you. With the replacement unit, however, she will no longer be able to play them, because it’s a different box now. You can still play them because you purchased them, but not your wife.
One way to fix this is either get on support again to have them give you credits so that you can repurchase them, or I think you can also try to delete the games and then re-download. Try the latter with something you don’t care to lose forever to make sure the theory works. If it doesn’t work, call customer support.