Hiya!
there is however one major down fall is that when u are playing a game and say a dog knocks it over while its playing...
Now how could that happen?!? I'm not trying to make fun of you, but...
I've got my 360 lying flat in a shelf, no risk of it ever falling down unless in a severe earthquake (unlikely to happen in Austria). That also has the added bonus of the console being able to give off excess heat more easily, at least in my experience - and that thing generates a lot of heat.
It's also not possible for a disc to fall out of the tray when you open it (happened a couple of times to a friend of mine). However, once you've decided whether you want to have it lay down flat or stand up, you should stick to that. Switching between flat and standing can eventually ruin the disc drive. No idea how or why, but it happened.
another downfall is the red ring of death caused by many things but usually i think the older ones would normally get it tho. i had my 1st one for 2-3 years and not a single red ring of death
Frequent RRoD's (dubbed 'general hardware failure' my MS) only happened to early consoles because the manufacturer used the wrong type of lead-free solder (
article at Wikipedia). This has been fixed, as far as I know. However, my 360 being an early-version console, it RRoD'd twice in 13 months. But even if your 360 should RRoD, it has a 3-year warranty.
Cheers!