3 Rings of Death, and they sent me a new one for free.
Who sent you a new one for free?
If you mod your console you void the warranty.
I had terrible experiences with mod'ed PS2, I haven't mod'ed the our XBox 360 nor Wii (nor PSP nor DS) for that reason.
How reliable the XBox 360 mod here, and how reliable are the game copies? If it's always a pain to get the games to load, I'd rather stick with originals.