It finally happened. Our Xbox 360 died. Actually, this is our 5th major Xbox 360 issue- we have two 360s that have each been repaired twice - but it's the first one to fail outside of warranty.
It was another videocard death - and it happened fast. One minute the colors were flickering in Fallout New Vegas (at first I thought it was an in-game effect!) and the next, only blackness.
This is not our first time at the replacement rodeo. Two years back, we sent a launch Xbox 360 in for repair after a red ring of death and received this one back as its replacement. Back then, we had nearly 900 bits of licensed downloadable content (DLC) to recover and there were problems. This time? More than 2000! And each piece of DLC that we want to have available for offline and shared use must be redownloaded. The good news is that if the content is on your hard drive, it only takes a few seconds for each item to check that the file is there are recover the license.
Things actually went smoother this time, for the most part. If you think your Xbox 360 might die in the near future (all hardware fails eventually!), here are a few small steps you can take to be prepared so you can recover quickly and with minimum pain:
- Get a hard drive transfer cable if you use a hard drive on your 360. You'll want to have it on hand so you can move your old hard drive's contents to the new one right away. If you already have one, find it and put it with your Xbox 360 accessories. Don't worry about the disc that comes with it; if you get one of the new "Slim" models (which is all you can buy new), you won't need it - the transfer software is built in.
- Don't upgrade to a larger hard drive if you can avoid it. The drives on the new Slims are smaller and hidden inside the console; you won't be able to simply swap an old hard drive from the original models to a new one. Plus, more stuff on the drive means more stuff you'll need to transfer!
- Stop using memory cards. Transfer any content on memory cards to your hard drive or move it to USB flash cards since the new Xbox 360 won't take memory cards. You'll need decent ones that are fast and 1GB or larger.
- Whenever possible, purchase bundles of DLC. Each file you download will either need to be recovered individually - for instance, a whole album of songs for Rock Band is only one file to recover versus downloading 5-10 tracks. If you're already buying most of the songs in a pack, you're better off getting the pack.
- Don't bother downloading frivolous freebies. I found all kinds of DLC I don't need in my Download History, such as gamer pictures for the movie Balls of Fury - which I still haven't even bothered to see! Just get the stuff you're likely to use. Otherwise, you'll regret it when you're up in the middle of the night wading through all that junk to find the stuff you care about.
Inside the New Xbox 360 "Slim" 
Once it was clear the Xbox 360 wasn't coming back, I ran out and picked up one of the shiny black Xbox 360 "Slim" models with 250GB hard drive. It was actually a little tricky to find one, but I finally located one at our local Fred Meyer department store. The console is considerably shorter in height and does not support hard drives from the first 4 1/2 years of Xbox 360. I actually couldn't find the hard drive without some help; it's hidden inside the unit and I couldn't figure out how to access and remove it on my own. But there is a video that shows how to remove the hard drive if you're interested.
When you transfer your old hard drive's content with the transfer cable (not included; you will need to buy this separately), you'll leave the hard drive inside the new unit and hook the cable to your old drive. You no longer need a disc for this; just hook up the cable and if you don't see a prompt to start the transfer, go to your System Settings, choose Memory and look for Transfer Cable. The drive has the full Hexic HD and trials of several other games including Peggle and Pinball FX. I chose NOT to overwrite these but it did interrupt the transfer, adding several hours to the process since I wasn't always in the room to clear the messages right away. Retail disc games you had installed won't copy over, nor will your cache. So you'll have to reinstall your favorite games and any games that had been patched over Xbox Live will need to be repatched the next time you play.
The other key difference with the new Xbox 360 is the lack of memory card slots. Fortunately, we have a second Xbox 360 that I could use to transfer our profiles and saved games to USB flash drives. But, again, you'd be well served to move to USB drives before you make the switch. If your profile is on your old hard drive, you will need to recover it to the new console before you can do the hard drive transfer.
You also won't need the power supply that comes with standaline Kinects (wish we'd just bought a bundle a few weeks ago!). It just plugs into the specially marked port in the back of the new Xbox 360. I did have a moment of panic when it seemed like the console was freezing when I first rebooted it after attaching the Kinect. It actually takes about a minute to load the Kinect setup routine. After three reboots, including one with the Kinect disconnected to ensure the new Xbox 360 wasn't defective, I went upstairs to research the problem on my PC. When I came back, it was all fine and dandy, just sitting there asking me to configure Kinect for first use. So be patient and don't freak if it looks like it's frozen on sign in.
License recovery: Better, but still not consumer friendly
After going through the Xbox 360 setup, I went to Xbox Live to access the once a year license transfer tool. This process is a little confusing. You need to have the Xbox 360 that you're transferring your licenses to signed in with the same profile you're accessing on the Web site. It warns you that the process will sign you out of Xbox Live on the console, but doesn't explain why. It's actually a security measure to prevent unintended license transfers - either by someone who might hack your account or you if, say, you're signed in on the wrong console when you click the transfer button on the Web. You'll have to sign back in on your console BEFORE the transfer will begin.
Once it's done, you will probably want to recover all of your DLC for offline and shared use. If you do NOT, other family members won't be able to use purchased DLC (offline or online) and if Xbox Live or your Internet goes down, or you take your console on a trip, it won't work. Xbox Live Arcade games will revert to trial versions and saved games that depend on add-ons (like in Borderlands, Fallout 3 or Oblivion) may take away in-game features and generally mess with your ability to safely progress.
If you license music for your games, particularly the Rock Band series with its 2000+ song library, you're going to want to get them all. Rock Band 2 loaded our songs from the cache it had made - but when I tried to play one offline before recovering the licenses, my playlist failed and it dumped me back at the main menu. To make sure this never happens, I wanted to double-check that our 400+ tracks (DLC, Rock Band Network and original Rock Band and Lego Rock Band exports) were all licensed to the new console. There's actually a good way to ensure you get them all. First I went to Quick Play and made a note of how many songs I had in each category (387 DLC, 17 RBN, 55 for Rock Band and 84 for Rock Band 2). I quit to the dashboard, went into the System Settings, Memory and moved my Rock Band 2 Song Cache to a USB Flash Drive and then removed the drive. When I rebuilt the cache in the game while disconnected from Xbox Live, it showed only 3 DLC songs still licensed (freebies from the original Rock Band). After I had gone through and redownloaded all of the licenses via Download History, I rebuilt the cache again offline and it was back at the numbers I had before. Since my old cache was so much larger (3MB vs. less than 100K), I deleted the new one I had made for the DLC check and moved the original cache back into place from the USB drive.
A word on video licenses. I've not been a fan of the new Zune video channel. For one thing, it doesn't make a ton of sense to me since I don't have a Zune media player! It just felt like irrelevant branding. Even worse, it replaced a video library that was neatly integrated into the Xbox 360 dashboard and fast to access. Selecting Zune video launches an app that takes you out the dashboard, adding load times both when entering and exiting it. But I was pleased to see that videos I had previously deleted - including one I was unable to recover two years ago during my last license recovery - are there and it was easy to watch and download them. Rather than recover these from the download history, it was just as easy to start watching the videos while connected to Xbox Live - which has the same effect. The videos I watched all worked offline, while most that I did not watch popped up a license error when I was offline.
I did have a major issue with the Download History, which displayed my list of purchased content in different order each time that I loaded it. This made it really difficult to pick up where I left off without missing anything important. I overcompensated and I'm sure I redownloaded the same things several times (just to be safe). If you can power through your whole list of purchases in one sitting, do it. I skipped videos, any themes and gamer pictures I don't use regularly and all demos and trials - and it still took me 6-8 hours to complete over two days. Honestly, I don't see why they don't just offer a button to scan your hard drive for installed DLC and then download all of the licenses for your profile all at once. (Anything not installed doesn't matter; if and when you redownload it, you'll get the license when you do.)
One downside of being a two Xbox household is that we've purchased things for more than one 360. We had to recover both my purchases and GrrlGotGame's to the new Xbox 360 so I'd have access to some add-ons that were licensed to her, but this means the second copy of several Xbox Live Arcade games and a few DLC add-ons that we own are now licensed to same console as the first copy - which is pointless. We can still play those games on the second console as long as our Internet and Xbox Live are both working and GrrlGotGame plays on the crappy old Xbox 360. There really should be a way to manage individual licenses or, as we've said many times, license content once per household like iTunes (they are tied to a credit card, which prevents abuse, and you would just need the ability to revoke a console).
The good news is that we're back up and running on a console that should hold us until the next generation of Xbox.
I think I only saw it b/c I was working in a theatre at the time but Balls of Fury isn't terrible. If you've run out of things to watch and someone accidentally put it on the netflix queue and it's just lying there.. go ahead and put it in.
I recently purchased a game on my brother's xbox using my xbox live account & tried to download it on my xbox & it all worked fine. However I can't play the game offline does this involve the licensing issue & thus gives me no way to play it unless I first connect to xbox live?? Because if I'm in the game & I disconnect it I can still play but once I quit the game it reverts back to the trial which is very frustrating.
Yes, this is the same issue. Content is licensed to both a gamertag and a console ID. You can consolidate any licenses you bought elsewhere with the License Transfer Tool - just don't run it if you're thinking of getting a new Xbox 360 soon! Because then all of your content would be online only for the remainder of that year unless you can convince support to grant you an exception. (If your console is replaced under warranty after you send it in for repair, they're supposed to do this for you.)