Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed that, more and more often, my Xbox 360 will hang and give me an error message saying “the disc is unreadable” and inform me that I should clean the disc. Normally I’d say I have some pretty dirty discs, but the times it’s doing it, the discs are brand new - not even a single scratch. Eject the disc and pop it back in and it’s fixed. No cleaning required.

It’s averaging about every hour-and-a-half of game play now. I might play for four hours without interruption one day, but the next day it’ll happen two or three times in an hour. Since it’s really starting to get annoying (and seems to be happening at some pretty inopportune times, like just after you beat a really hard mission but before you can save), I called Xbox Support.

I’ll be sending my console in for repairs, this time for a failing DVD drive. This is the second bad DVD drive I’ve had. Let’s see…

• Bad DVD drive in July 2006
• Red Ring of Death in April 2007
• Frozen Screen in September 2007
• Xbox Dasbhoard Update Trashed my Hard Drive in December 2007 (didn’t require a new Xbox, but still)

…and now we’ve come full circle with a bad DVD drive.

The box to ship my console back to them should arrive tomorrow, per the UPS site. I’ll probably play through the weekend and then send it back. It’s not unplayable, just super annoying, and I’m so close to finishing the story missions in GTA4.