When I bought my Xbox 360, I decided to go the super cheap route and get a used one from GameStop, which as you can imagine can be quite a gamble in terms of quality. Well, anyways, I brought the thing home, hooked it up, and low and behold the damn thing gave me an error screen from the start, which stopped showing after a few attempts at restarting the console. Flash forward to less than a month later, and the color becomes screwy while I'm playing a game. I try restarting the 360, but then it doesn't display a picture at all while still outputting sound, which is caused by the graphics chip frying itself to the point of being unusable.
Thankfully, it was less than a month after I bought it, so I was able to exchange that turd for another without using the extended warranty I bought with the first one. The second one I still have today, and it hasn't given me any trouble at all.
I also semi-bricked a Wii trying to downgrade the firmware (I selected the wrong firmware for my region, downgrading to a european firmware instead of a north american firmware), and then further screwed it up by trying to perform a system update which made the console think it was a European console, thus making it impossible to correct the problem. Thankfully, GameStop took it back and replaced it (with me simply claiming that the thing just stopped functioning properly), although this was just after the 30day warranty had expired making me have to buy another extended warranty.
