We’ve learned a painful lesson at my house about how easy it is to damage disks for electronic games like X-Box 360. Apparently a lot of other parents have faced the same issue, since GameStop has a display illustrating the problem. Essentially, a game stops working and you examine the disk, only to see that there is a distinctive groove around it.

Apparently it’s easy to incur this problem, a “laser burn” that can ruin any game. The trick to avoiding this is to:

• Make sure the game console is off the floor and has some air circulation beneath it
• Don’t move the console while it is in play
• Wait several minutes (about 10)  before moving a console after it’s been on

You can purchase a “protection program” for the disks you by, but why bother when you know what to do to avoid laser burn now?