Xbox 360 is Microsoft’s popular game console that was initially launched in 2005. But while Xbox 360 has been by and large a well received product, which has gone on to deliver on most of what it promises, a number of problems have been identified with it (as would be expected of any product based on intricate electronic circuitry).

One of the commonest Xbox 360 problems is the so called Xbox 360 red ring of death – or ‘general hardware failure’ in engineer-speak, and which has been known to render the Xbox 360 it affects virtually unusable. While Microsoft has not been too forthcoming with the specific details on what could be the real problem behind the Xbox 360 red ring of death, independent analysts who have take the trouble to examine the affected game consoles have expressed the opinion that it could be one of the Xbox 360 problems occurring due to graphics card soldering mistakes. Microsoft has however undertaken mitigating actions against this error, and it is no longer as common as it used to be in the early days of the Xbox 360.

Other common Xbox 360 problems, besides the red ring of death, include the so-called E74 Errors – associated with video problems in the game console. It is the Xbox Error E74 and the Xbox 360 red ring of death, that make the commonest Xbox 360 problems, and it is in recognition of this fact that Microsoft started offering extended three year warranties against these problems.

Another less common Xbox 360 problem is the so called open tray error, where the game console, when unable to read a multimedia file from either a compact disk (CD) or a Digital Video (DVD), has been known to ‘altogether forget’ about the disk it is unable to read, instead offering the user the option of ‘opening the tray’ – which can be frustrating. Thankfully, unlike the first two Xbox 360 problems described earlier, which are more often than not rooted in very sensitive parts of the console’s core circuitry, the open tray error is usually just a matter to do with the ‘local’ parts of the console responsible for CD/DVD reading, and sorting it out can be as simple a matter as getting the lasers with which it reads these devices cleaned.