The consumer electronics business is known for short product lifetimes, disposable products and short warranties. One product that has rocked that trend is the Microsoft XBOX360, which started with a solid one-year warranty, but has seen warranty extensions due to product reliability issues.

Now Microsoft has announced yet another extension bringing the total XBOX warranty for some owners to three years.

The first of these extensions was due to the dreaded and renowned ‘Red Ring of Death’ or RRoD as it is known, which indicated an irrecoverable hardware system failure requiring the console to be sent to Microsoft for repair / replacement.

After a couple of years troubleshooting and implementing fixes, it seemed that Microsoft had solved the RRoD issue permanently. It seemed that they would finally be out of the woods of being known as the ‘most likely to fail’ console ever, replacing Sony’s PS2 DVD drive issues.

However, after releasing a system software upgrade called the ‘New User Experience’ (known as NXE) last fall, XBOX360 owners, even those with brand new systems, began seeing new failures that became known as ‘E74′ based on the error code displayed on screen.

While the reports were spotty at first and not covered under Microsoft’s extended warranty, pretty soon places such as Joystiq and the Seattle Examiner began taking note of these issues. They reported a sharp spike in E74 errors since the launch of the NXE, and even called E74 the ‘new RRoD’.

For a while Microsoft resisted such a label, but as noted at Engadget, Microsoft has now indicated that E74 errors would be covered as part of the three year extended warranty.

They will also refund money spent dealing with the issue. This is another good step for Microsoft – people I know who have had problems with their console have spoken of generally being very satisfied at the speed and manner of getting their problems resolved. Of course, when compared with the very low reports of failures of Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii systems, it might be that gaining reknown for good customer service because of high rate of system mortality isn’t exactly the model Microsoft had in mind. You can view the Microsoft notice regarding the warranty extension here.

Images courtesy of the Seattle Examiner.

Link: Description of the E74 error message warranty extension