My First Three Flashing Red Lights

I'm presently on my third Xbox 360 console, my second replacement console which has lasted me about a year and a half. Long time readers of Arbiter's Judgement will know that I've always had issues with the DVD drive, and have never once experienced the infamous three flashing red lights. This past Tuesday, however, this all changed but thankfully it wasn't my console!

That company I work for purchased an Xbox 360 Elite, which I picked up for them. As soon as I returned to the office, naturally, I began the set up process, and once I started creating the Avatar during Initial Setup, bam, three flashing red lights.

Outside of pictures and videos, I've never actually seen the three flashing red lights before, and while I've both heard of and helped people who've had this happen to them right out of the box, I really never thought it would happen to me. My first reaction after staring at it for several seconds was to laugh out loud, as I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

So I began the basic troubleshooting steps of turning the console off and on, disconnecting and reconnecting cables, etc. and nothing worked, it kept giving the three flashing red lights. I then disconnected everything and walked away, letting the console sit for a while.

Personally, I didn't want to cab it back to Best Buy and stand in a holiday return line, and thankfully it looks like I won't have to. After letting the console sit for a while, I reconnected everything once more and the Xbox 360 Elite has been working flawlessly ever since.

We've had people play a variety of games on it, both from the DVD drive and HDD install, and someone even watched a DVD off of it, and no more hardware failure. I'm hoping it was a loose connection or something, as this console was manufactured in mid-October of this year, so it's ridiculously new.

Well, at least it's a) not my personal console, b) under a 30 day store warranty, and c) under a three year general hardware failure warranty with Xbox Support. Hopefully I'll never have to use either.