Not only do I dislike the PS3, and find the Wii boring, but if I owned either of those consoles and they broke, I would be almost totally screwed. I know two friends whose PS3s have broken, and one was lucky enough to have theirs under the year warranty. He still had to pay £60 for the privilege of having it sent off and repaired, and when it was returned the warranty was only extended by 60 days. The unlucky guy's console had air bubbles in the motherboard. As it was over the year warranty, Sony refused outright to fix it. He took it to a backstreet repairer who charged him £120 once it was fixed. The cost of sending off my 360 to be fixed and having it returned again is £0.00 I'll never look back.
They give you the box, you package it, and send it back through the mail. The mailing sticker Microsoft should give you makes it free to mail.
Actually, Microsoft somehow got UPS to email me with the electronic label. I printed it out and put the xbox in my old PS2 box (they don't supply a box in the UK). I even messed up the postage and they took it! (I put UPS Standard Domestic even though it should be UPS Standard EU Trans-Border, but when I asked the delivery guy about it, he said it'd be fien and that it can only possible go to one place, regardless of "how badly you ****ed up the completion form"). The only catch is that it has to weigh 4kg. An xbox 360 weighs 3.5kg, so you can only use 500g of packaging. Not the end of the world though
I've just got something like this. It started when I was playing ODST (I started to try and get used to it again because someone said they wanted help on it) and I was walking around having just watched the "Prepae to drop" video, I went in front of a supply cache, I had just enough time to notice it should be unlocked when my whole screen went green and wonky with lines going up and down the screen like yours. now my avatar has vertical lines going through it and whenever I go into a game it plays the intro fine and then when I get into the game solid objects (such as buildings) have vertical lines through them and I can see the background space through the lines....