I'm apparently screwed out of my extended warranty; I bought it through the card that came in the box, and they charged our credit card (this was back in Feb 07). So now our disc drive started dying a couple months ago where basically sometimes games fail the initial load (it reads games as DVDs), but once you get it to boot it's fine, although you can sometimes hear the drive working incredibly hard. So anyway they have NO record of us purchasing the warranty. I've sent in a copy of the fucking bank statement that clearly states "MICROSOFT EXT WARRANTY" and the amount, I've been through 3 different supervisors, including the last one who is apparently their last resort who has gotten back in touch with me several times, and they swear they have no record of our credit card ever being charged for anything there. The supervisor just did a 4th (?) callback to me and said basically there's nothing more they can do, aside from sending in another copy of the bank statement, because they somehow lost the last one even though it went registered mail and I can prove they sent it. So I'm probably out the $50 for the warranty, and fixing the system would cost $99.
At this point if the thing dies completely I don't even know if I care enough to replace the system or pay to have it fixed, I'm so completely tired of the bullshit. I could probably sell the system to someone at work for $100 (to cover the repair costs) and then buy an arcade unit and just slap the HDD in there which would be convenient to get HDMI, but I shouldn't even have to be considering that as an option. I'm almost considering trying to ride the system out through the end of the year; now that I have a PS3 (that works fine!), if it can last through Tales of Vesperia, GoW 2, Viva 2, and maybe Fable 2, I don't think there's anything I really care about after that. I can say for sure I'm not picking up the next MS system until way, waaaaay after launch, and this coming from someone who has had PS1s and PS2s die on me.