Despite its many achievements in this console generation, the Xbox 360 is still struggling to shake its reputation for poor hardware reliability – but Microsoft has insisted that its new repair procedures should limit the problems in the future.

Xbox 360 has become renown for what is known as the Red Ring of Death – or RROD – a fault related to overheating that causes the front ring of the machine to display three red lights.

Speaking to Edge Online, Xbox 360 director Aaron Greenberg stated: “We've improved that repair process. It's very quick, and they may upgrade your system with the latest technology. So that works really well.

“What we do in general, the way that it works, is that they will fix it with the latest hardware improvements that we've applied to current Xbox 360s. Obviously we're continuously improving the technology inside the box, not to get too technical. So they'll apply that when they make the increments to your system.

“What it comes down to is isolating and figuring out the issue, fixing the issue, and the more that we can fix the issue, and know it's fixed, then we're good going forward. We've put the worst behind us on this, but we know there are a few lagging systems, and so we want to take those and make it right.”

In July 2007, after a prolonged silence on the issue, Microsoft admitted that there were inherent hardware problems with its machine, setting aside over $1bn for the repair work and extending Xbox 360 warranties from one to three years.