Well that's just great isn't it? My second Xbox 360 bites the dust. My original console suffered from the dreaded red ring of death just before Christmas and Microsoft was quick to send out a replacement model - though hampered slightly by the Christmas break. This time though the symptoms are different. Over the last few days I've been playing Saint's Row ready for my review (thankfully I've got enough play time in to review now) but started to see the occasional glitch this evening.

Now at first I thought this was a bug, because as I'll point out in my review on Tuesday, the game has a real serious problem when it comes to standard definition display. But this was more serious. Every so often the console would just freeze. There would be some odd lines on the screen and the console was locked up. No warning lights. I'd reset the console and play again and all would be fine.

However this has happened a few times now this evening and I was getting fed up, thinking it was glitches in the game. After a break of a couple of hours I booted up Saints Row again. But this time the display was just going blank and it would do this within seconds of loading from a save and entering the game world. So I booted up FIFA World Cup Germany, everything went fine in picking the teams and loading up the match. But within a couple of seconds of the display switching to the 3D match the display went blank.

So the 360 seems to be coping with all the loading screens and front end and the like. But when it comes to actually pushing polygons it dies on its arse. Now I'm suspecting some kind of cooling issue here. I also think that it might be related to giving the 360 more of a workout over the weekend than it had previously. You see before the weekend I had the console working on an SDTV. But on Friday I decided to move it into my office and hook it up to the spare VGA input on my monitor. Now the console has had a couple of days of shifting around HD images and has gone kaput.

That makes it seem to me that my console's had a fault for a while but it's only now come to light. So tomorrow I get to phone Microsoft support for the second time and get them to send me yet another console. The 360 is my favourite console I've owned but it really is a nightmare where faults are concerned. I know I'll have a replacement within a week or so, but the issue remains that I've had two consoles go fault on me. I'm getting a little nervous now about what happens outside the warranty period, these consoles seem damn fragile to me. I'm also wondering how bad these issues will affect Sony given that the PS3 is relying on some rather untried technology.

Anyway, that's my news. The damn Xbox 360 died. I would have been happier if it bothered showing some error codes or rings of red that would make it clearer what the problem is. But at least testing with several games shows it's the hardware.