I would say the given 3 year RRoD warranty is not enough because the one time i had to exchange mine it was due to disc scratching (which wouldn't have been covered under the 3 year one). Personally even though it involves a little wait i would go with the MSoft one. $60 to fully cover yourself for 3 years is decent. They also will transfer your warranty to any new systems you get if they have to replace one.

I love that service plan (actually a replacement plan; they don't service the item). When I was having trouble with my HD-DVD, I took it back, swapped it out for another, took advantage of their promotion at the time and got two free HD-DVDs and they told me that the replacement plan still applied to the new unit since I swapped for the same item during the warranty peroid. You know that the price of the 360 will drop again, so if you know that you're going to swap out the system anyway, you really can't lose with their plan.

Having said that, I think the regular MS warranty now is probably good enough. I imagine that MS will have a hard time denying free repairs to everyone now that they've admitted they've manufatcured a faulty product.

Like has been mentioned on the board in other places though - the 3 year free coverage only covers RRoD issue. So if it is scratching movies and/or games you are out the 120$ to repair if you don't have the warrant.

Getting them to transfer the warranty is extreme YMMV. Maybe it is different with the HD drive than the console.

That's true, but if it hasn't scratched your discs in a year, it probably isn't going to start doing that though, right?

Mine did. Out of the blue it started making a slight noise and then putting light circular buff marks on the discs. I kept with it for a few days and it eventually scratched one of the games (the game was still playable) and started having errors recognizing games. Luckily i had the extended warranty and took mine and got me another one pretty quickly.

Well, after a trip to Target, two Wal-Marts, a Gamestop, Best Buy, and Circuit City...

I have come up empty on my search for a Premium with HDMI.

It looks like I'm going to have to simply go with the one on Amazon, and opt for the extended warranty from Microsoft.

[Thanks for all the warranty replies once again.]

Not sure if anyone is looking for Blue Dragon or not but I saw it on the shelves at TRU. I think the street date for this is the 28th.

Thanks, ed. I think my first retail 360 game purchases will be BD, ES, and Bioshock if/when they do their annual B2G1.

Anyone know how much Gamestop is buying regular xbox's these days? I checked ebay and craigslist and looks like maybe $50 if I'm lucky?

First Bioshock, now this? Doesn't Toys R Us understand the whole concept of "street dates"?

Gamecrazy has a deal where they'll give you an extra $50 ($90 total) if you put it towards the purchase of a 360.

saw some dude today who got 32.50 cash. lmao

Oh man.. I might check that out tonight.

I picked up one of the newly manufactured 360 premium with the HDMI port this weekend (Best Buy had 7 of them in stock). They were not stickered as some articles suggested they would be, with HDMI, they were just mixed with the other stock. The only way to tell the difference is on the spec panel they said HDMI port very small.

So far at least, I can really tell a difference. The other 360 I had played much louder and ran hotter than this one does, despite being on a cooling stand. I played the new one last night for several hours and never heard it running and it was only somewhat warm afterwards (no difference than any other electronic appliance) despite the fact that I don't have a cooling stand anymore.

Obviously this one could still fail at anytime and I could be totally wrong, but I am hoping that this means that these newer models have some of the massive problems that the others had fixed in it. I have no idea if that means that this new model I purchased has the new 65 chip in it, as I have no idea how to find that info, but I kind of remember hearing that these weren't expected until next month, although IGN suggested that their were already some of them out there.

On a side note: I went to my local Toys R Us hoping to capitalize on some of the lay down date mix-ups that have been reported here. No such luck for me, apparently some of the employees at my local store can read.

Ridge Racer 6 is a lot of fun.

Ridge Racer 6 having over $40 of individually priced music tracks (which are all from the previous two games) is lame.

Anyone planning to buy an HDMI 360 from Amazon using the free shipping option? Don't. Mine is taking forever to get here.

Why I buy a $350 toy, but not spring for the $10 (or however much it would be) in shipping I will never know.

I have Peggle to tide me over though

Last time I heard it was $20 (trade-in) $16 (cash) for the system.

What a joke.

Questoin about MS warranty do u have to sign up for it within a certain # of days of buying the system?

I heard they'll give you $15 credit for a used 20gig HD!

I don't know about "regular" warranty issues, but for the RROD issue, it turns out that I had not registered my launch-day 360 and had to register it last night to submit a claim. I had no problem registering nearly 2 years after-the-fact.

I think you have the entire 1 year to add the extended warranty if that is what you are asking.

The warranty card that comes in the 360 box says you have 14 days from date of purchase to send it in. MS doesn't actually enforce that though. There have been reports of people getting the extended warranties months, and even years, after buying their 360.

For the life of me I can't get past like stage 7 or 8. At one point no matter what I do (even if I race without crashing), I can't win.