Two weeks to the day I shipped it off, my Xbox 360 arrived back at work via UPS. I’m an utter crap bastard when it comes to blogging since I do have an almost finished post on “Shipping your fooked 360 to Microsoft” which I should have posted earlier, but I’ll do that tomorrow.

Anyhoo, here it is in all it’s boxed glory (a different box from what I sent it in):

Neato! There’s a cracking letter explaining what was broken, which in this case was the motherboard. So nothing major then…

And I like how I’m an Xbox Enthusiast, I’d have preferred Paying Customer who doesn’t like faulty hardware, but then I’d have never have bought a 360 if that was really the case.

They’ve given me a 1 month Xbox Live Gold Subscription Card which is cool. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have put the case on properly since I had trouble connecting the hard drive and the power supply especially. For the latter it looks like the case is slightly off to the left, but some brute force sorted that out.

I checked the serial number and it is indeed my Xbox 360, not a refurbished one like they seem to be doing over in the U.S. So I should have no issues playing all my Xbox Live Arcade games offline. It’s still as noisy as ever and it had forgotten it’s wireless network settings, but that’s not really an issue.

Other than that though, it all seems to be OK! I’m pretty impressed by the turnaround Microsoft did on it since I was told it would be 25 days, so I wasn’t expecting it back until October at the earliest!

So it was nice surprise and at least now I can have a proper go playing that Bioshock demo!

• Related guff – The Xbox 360 Saga Box Set