[quote name='dman1869']Ok, so here's what I discovered. It's not the TV or disc. It's the actual Xbox itself. I tried a bunch of different combinations with different TVs, different discs, different games, but some reason, my son's Xbox when it plays Gears of War 2 only, has the spotting problem. I called Microsoft and they ran me through some diagnostic stuff and we eliminated the harddrive from being the issue but nothing we did fixed the problem. So they let me know since the system is out of warranty (by 2 months) that I can send it in for $99. After having 4 broken Xboxes I'm not too happy about spending another $99 for them to fix a 5th. We'll just be dealing with the issue for now.[/QUOTE]
Personally I wouldn't pay that. For $200 you'd get a new unit with new hardware, and can just use your old drive, versus getting a refurbed model that will probably break again, though I know a lot of people prefer going the refurb route.
[quote name='Spybreak8']Weird thing happened yesterday. I hooked up my wireless wheel and played some PGR4 but had some weird video problems. As I was racing all of a sudden the video would cut out, total blackness, then after a second or so it would come back in. This happened multiple times during the race, really hard to drive with a wheel when you can't see! This doesn't happen to me with any other game so could a disc create this phenomenon? Is this a sign that my video card is getting close to it's end? I'm going to try and play it today ripped to the hard drive.[/QUOTE]
Good idea about ripping it to the hard drive. Try it on another TV if you can, but yeah, sounds suspicious.
I know it's weird, but it's possible for GPUs to fail in a way that SOME stuff seems to run fine, and other stuff doesn't. Doom 3 really showed up problems on the GPUs of the day when it came out 'cause it pushed the hardware a lot harder than other games-used more of it. Something like Gears 2 that doesn't surprise me, but other games could be using the hardware in a way that other games aren't. Eventually it'll spread probably and start doing that in every game, but they can fail weirdly.