Xbox360 repair time line, addendum

I have a quick aside to the repair process that is going to have me calling my local GameStop tomorrow morning.

A few days before my Xbox360 reached the clearing at the end of the path, my mom's husband's unit, a year younger than mine and played less often, started its trip through the repair cycle. He received his unit back a few days ago, in working order... until tonight. Seems his refurbished unit has died with the lower right red light and an error 74. Again this is a hardware failure along the same vein as the RRoD so he's once again out of action.

I'm thinking of trying to get as much trade in value as I can for my box and trading it in for a new unit before i give the refurbished box a chance to die. That is assuming that it works out of the box. I really think I'd have better luck with a new box than with a refurb. Besides, it would be a great excuse to upgrade to an elite. We'll see if I get a box back Monday and what condition it's in when it gets here.

Update: I did some troubleshooting tonight while I was over visiting the family. First off it seems like he got the exact same box back after only a day in the repair center. I really wonder if they did anything other than slap a new label on it and hope the jostling from UPS and FedEx fixed it. I also found this handy list of Xbox360 error codes. From the extended error code on the 3 red rings, and the E74 error code on the initial failure message his case is a failure of the scaler chip and not the graphics chip. That's interesting to me since there is no cooling at all for that component, and it's fairly small. Makes me wish I had found the site before my unit died so I could compare the failure reason.