Technical problems
The Xbox 360 can be subject to a number of technical problems. Since the console’s release in 2005, the console gained a bad reputation from the general public and in the press through articles portraying the poor reliability and relatively high failure rate of the early consoles. Since these problems surfaced, design modifications have been made to the console to improve reliability. All consoles manufactured after June 2007 have a second GPU heatsink to reduce overheating.In February 2008 an examination of 1040 Xbox 360s by SquareTrade found a 16.4% (one in six) failure rate. 171 were returned under warranty as “disabled”, 60% with the red “ring of death”. To aid consumers with defective consoles, Microsoft has extended the Xbox 360’s manufacturer’s warranty to three years for general failure errors only.