I think my replacement 360 is a lemon.

The first signs of trouble were when starting up Halo 3, where there was a bit of a stutter during the Bungie logo animation. I didn’t think much of it at the time since things like that are common in PC games, where it’s just disk I/O as stuff is being loaded. Then, there was the problem I mentioned before where I lost the sound in Eets and it froze while trying to quit back to the dashboard. Again, I didn’t think much of it since it seemed to be an Eets-specific problem.

But, last night I turned it on to queue up some more demo and trailer downloads, and was greeted with those infamous three flashing lights. Oddly enough it still continued to boot normally while the lights were flashing, whereas with the previous box I’d get nothing but a blank screen. I turned it off and back on again, and the three red lights haven’t reoccurred since.

It’s now freezing on me left and right, though. I can’t complete a single chapter in Halo 3 or race in the Flatout UC demo without it freezing within a few minutes of starting, and sometimes it’ll do so while just sitting at the dashboard, or in the middle of downloads.

Ugh.