So Friday afternoon (evening) I was playing Oblivion, after about 1/2 hour, the screen went blank, the xbox turned off, and my daughter said "There's red blinking lights on the Xbox!"

Oh crap. With over 1500 different internal parts, I was pretty sure my xbox had just died.

So I called Xbox support and went through the usual non-helpful, troubleshooting tips. I had quickly read some stuff while on hold that stated the three blinky lights meant hardware failure.

So the tech support rep, who was very nice, had me do a ton of things and she finally said, "I think it's your power supply, we'll ship you out a new one ASAP." I kind of argued and said, I don't see how it would be that... blah blah blah....

So I guess I'll have to wait to get the 'new' power brick, plug it in, and see that it's still broken.

When I called the rep also told me, "Wow, you're lucky, a week later and you'd be out of warranty...do you want to purchase an extended warranty?" I usually hate doing this, but now that I know how much we (all of my family) use this thing, I opted to purchase a 1 year extended warranty for $29.95.

The good news, is that when I ship this in, I can remove the hard drive, preserving (in theory) my games, demos, and everything I've done thus far on my console.

Let me tell you this, if my oblivion game is lost, (I had just gotten to level 10) it's going to be pretty hard to start over.

Here's what you DON'T want to see: