Repair specialists refuse to take 360's

UK-based repairs specialist Micromart has told GamesIndustry.biz that it has had to refuse to service Xbox 360 consoles that display three red lights, dubbed the Red Ring of Death.

Before it put a stop to the repair service, Micromart says it was seeing around 30 consoles a week over a period of several months.

"We were seeing about 30 a week before we pulled the plug on the service," said Jeff Croft of Micromart.

"We saw it over a period of several months and it was just getting worse. It began towards the end of last year. Once the twelve month warranty finished then we started to see more and more machines being sent in to be looked at.

"The problem with three red lights was there fairly regularly, but over two or three months it became a real issue," he detailed.

Micromart acts for individual retailers who send customers' goods to the specialist. Croft says his company pulled the service after discovering problems with the motherboard, and that repairing the console wasn't financially feasible. Even after working on a number of machines, the company didn't feel comfortable with the end result.

"The work we had done to the console lead us to believe that basically it was a fault with the motherboard and not something that could be resolved easily. And it wasn't going to go away.

"Rather than lead customers up the garden path we'd walk away from it and tell them to go directly to Microsoft because they have the facility to replace the motherboard. If Microsoft has updated the motherboard for the new consoles that it's producing then presumably they've improved the existing model."

Croft said the company had written to Microsoft to inform it of the problems encountered but had received no reply.

"We're not taking that thing on board; we won't repair them. We originally did some work with it but it's labour intensive and it isn't really a feasible repair for us to undertake. We would probably end up charging GBP 100 for a repair and we still wouldn't be happy with the end result," he added.

Microsoft has faced a barrage of criticism over hardware failure and it's customer service. In February this year the company came under fire from the BBC's Watchdog programme, but responded that there was no systematic issue with the console.