Microsoft must make up its mind: Either fix Xbox 360 or hire Don Draper.

A recent survey of 5,000 readers in the September print edition of Game Informer magazine found that just over 54 percent of them have suffered an Xbox 360 hardware failure requiring repair or replacement of the console. Out of that group, about 41 percent endured a second hardware failure.

Furthermore, the average repair or replacement took about a month.

PlayStation 3 and Wii owners in the survey, on the other hand, live pain-free lives by comparison. Their systems’ failure rates were 10.6 percent and 6.8 percent respectively, and the service time from the moment of breakdown to receipt of a fixed or new system was approximately a week.

Joystiq magazine was frankly shocked by the survey’s findings, saying that in the course of testing games their reviewers experienced 100 percent Xbox 360 failure rates. Game Guy was nonplussed, too, having noted here that he has seen the “red ring of death” on all four of his own systems — which also amounts to a 100 percent failure rate.

In 2008, a blogger at the Seattle Post-Intellegencer interviewed a source close to the Xbox 360’s development who claimed Microsoft pushed too hard to get the system out well before PS3 and Wii, and cut corners in production and troubleshooting to do so. By this time, Microsoft had extended the Xbox 360’s warranty and promised that newer systems, such as the Xbox 360 Elite, would be better designed and more durable. (Microsoft’s statement on this has since been pulled from Xbox.com.)

However, two of Game Guy’s dead Xboxes were purchased subsequent to this promise. One was an Elite. Both failed the same way his earlier consoles did — sporting the RROD.

Clearly, as the Game Informer survey shows, Microsoft’s problems with Xbox 360 have not abated. The company keeps lowering the price of Xbox to prop up sales figures and promises new technology, now called Project Natal. But Natal intends to make the console more interactive by demanding increased power and performance from a system that cannot now provide either. Meanwhile, the console carousel at Microsoft continues with repaired and replaced systems turning out the door as fast as new ones.

Short of admitting defeat and redesigning the system, Microsoft may then have to embark on a public relations campaign of biblical proportions and somehow assure us that failure is success, left is right, forward is backward and a dead console is just as valuable as a working one.

Sounds like a job for the Mad Men.