While your Xbox can be certainly entertaining and a whole lot of fun, you can at times find it to give you repair problems.

Most often when such problems come, people just phone their local service centre and ask someone to come in and have a look at their console. Instead of taking up the phone at the first instant of a problem, a better alternative is, to do a basic check up to ensure that there is indeed a problem with the device. This is necessary because the problem could be a very minor or negligible one and you would be wasting time in calling a technician.

Here is a look at what you can check up before you contact a repair centre. Check the cable plugs. If you have not plugged them in, you cannot switch on your console. So check these first!! If case the console's red lights are flashing, it is also a sign of it begin overheated but not necessarily burnt out and in need of service. So, switch off the console for sometime, to allow it to cool. Clean the console and fans, because dust can definitely make it stop functioning.

If these basic steps have not shown good results and you still see the red lights flashing on your Ring of Light (RoL), in the front part of your Xbox console, you can be sure that there is a hardware failure. Some symptoms that you will notice before a complete hardware failure is noise, frozen sound and the display of the unreadable disk messages often. Your next step is to take it to a repair centre for service.

You have two choices here. You can either send your Xbox to Microsoft Xbox repair centre else you can send it to a local Xbox repair centre. In case you plan to send it to Microsoft, you would have to wait for a period of three to six weeks for it to get fully repaired. Use their number 1-800-4MY-XBOX for information on what to do next. In case your Xbox comes under a warranty period, you can get it fixed for free and within a period of 90 days. One thing to note about sending your Xbox to Microsoft is that there is the possibility of getting a refurbished console instead of the one that you sent.

If you plant to send your console to a local repair centre, you must ensure to give it to experienced professionals. Otherwise, you could land up with short-term repairs and have the problem back again. If you are not satisfied with the local service and you want to send it to Microsoft note that they won't repair it at a reasonable cost, because you already opened it. You may find buying a new one to be cheaper than fixing it.