I've already owned a 360 so personally, I don't think it's well worth it to play these BS games with MS and their dead consoles. There are people here who have had to send consoles in multiple times, even ones with recent manufactured dates.

I've also read posts on more than one occasion where people say they bought a second 360 to use while their first one is being repaired. I'm sorry but that's ridiculous. I can't imagine giving more money to a company that already sold me a defective by design piece of equipment.

Until there is a 100% guaranteed way of knowing a 360 does not have the old, flawed build, I won't even think about purchasing one again.

Forgive me if this was mentioned already, but there is an accessory (or more than one possibly) that lets you back up your 360 HD to your PC.

Just to wrap this up, I went out this weekend and bought a replacement from Best Buy (got the "new" version w/ the included games too so that's a little perk). The one from Amazon went back into the mail today and will hopefully be refunded soon.

The new one is a little less noisy, still makes more noise than one would have thought. The rear USB works consistantly, and I replayed the first 3-4 level of Halo3 w/o seeing the "select device" message so hopefully everything is good to go now... atleast until the next problem

nemein,

Can you clarify what you mean by the "new version" and how you knew what was in the box?

Thanks...

The 360 Elite I bought in Oct didn't have any games packed in. Sometime in Nov they added the racing/Marvel game, therefore it's a "new" version As far as the hardware I doubt there were any changes. I'll try to remember to look tonight and see if I can find the date.

Well the replacement 360 started doing the "select memory device" thing during Halo3 again. I'll see if it starts doing it in other games but so far I have to say I'm not very impressed w/ the 360 and I'll probably reverse the trend from the last gen of games (everything that was available on the Xbox and PS2 I would buy on the Xbox since I thought it looked better and I liked the controller better... this time I'll buy everything on the PS3 since I'll know it'll at least work ).

That select a device issue is odd, but then I haven't played Halo3 yet (for some reason I just can't get motivated to).

I've never had the issue with Halo 3.

It does seem unlikely he'd have the same issue with 2 different complete 360's, including different hard drives.

Any strong, unshielded magnets around? I know its a stretch, but could it be something environmental near the 360?