'Three red lights flash on the Ring of Light'

Who ever reads this headline is part of 2 groups. The one group will think something like 'what the hell is he's talking about?' and members of the second group think 'Oh lord. Poor guy'.

Just to make things clear:
Maybe you noticed that I bought a XBOX360 on the launch day back in the 2nd of Dezember 2005.
Now there have been a few hang ups by the console while playing. It suddenly freezes the screen and after powering off the box and starting it up again, all you see are 3 flashing lights on the ring of light and nothing on the TV screen. Beside losing some gaming progresses and online-matches the problem was the XBOX wasn't able to boot up for several minutes.
The Microsoft Knowledge Base (usually filled with loads of good tips) didn't help so I finally called the XBOX360 support hotline and told 'em to exchange it. The guy, really friendly and supportive one, told me that there can be 3 reasons for the symptoms I've told him:

- hardware defect with the Harddisk
- defect with the power-supply
- defect with the XBOX360 unit

Hope it won't take too long...