DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Fantasy & Gaming Red Ring of Death (an obituary, of sorts, and request for help)

So it's happened. The Curse of the Red Ring of Death has been cast upon me. Oobernoober's apartment has been a quieter, sadder place (mostly because I'm forced to other activities outside of the apartment, which really isn't a bad thing).

The 360 Elite had a long, productive life. I got it shortly after the Elites first started shipping, promising an increased life expectancy due to more robust heat sinks and fans. It lasted me somewhere around 4 years, so I think it delivered.

I'm wondering if I should feel bitter about its lifespan, but I got it on the cheap, and it was used ALOT. Between video games (a couple times a week) to Netflix (almost every day between me, my girlfriend, and various roommates throughout the past couple years), the box logged quite a few hours of use.


Now that that's done with, I'm looking for recommendations for an Xbox 360 repair guide. Google searches bring up tons of these, from the absurd (wrap your Xbox tightly in a hot towel and turn it on) to some logical but complicated guides which have you perform invasive surgery.

I'm not shy about opening up the box. The warranty is long gone and it is non-functional now, so I have nothing to lose. If there is a chance I can bring it back from the dead, I'm going to go for it. I just need to know where to start.

Is there anyone on the boards who knows something about diagnosing and solving the RRoD issue? Any guidance, big or small, would be greatly appreciated.

Do you have a reflow station? If not, I'd suggest hitting up craigslist and finding an ad from one of the people who do who fix consoles for extra money. Will probably cost you around $50 but its better than buying a new xbox. RRoD is not something you just sit down and fix one day when you're bored, you gotta know what you're doing.

Wrapping my xbox in towells actually worked for me. It allowed me to log an extra 2 months before I had to send it in to Microsoft. Its not a permanent fix, but it worked for me.

As for fixing it yourself, look on youtube. There are tons of guides on there. I didn't follow it for my box bc it was still covered, but I did use it for fixing my PS2. Actually wasn't as hard as it seemed. Might be worth a glance.

My co-worker did some penny trick where you tape 5 pennies and use some thermal grease to fix his and he has been playing it for the last 3 years like that with no issues.

The towel trick just reflows the bad soldering job microsoft did in the first place, its a short term fix at best and will lead to more costly damage in the future, like the joints cracking from the excessive heat you're creating inside the console.

I don't really know anything about the penny trick, so I can't comment on it, but it probably does the same thing, just a little more reliably.

If you send it back to microsoft, even when its not under warranty, they'll send you back a 120gb Jasper, or yours with a new motherboard, seems to be kind of up to the tech who gets your xbox, but most people I know who did that got a new unit. That was if they had an equal or lesser unit, if you had a special edition or one of the more pricey units you'd get back an equivalent.

Without a warranty this used to cost $200 but I don't know if it still is as high now that xbox prices have dropped since I owned one and had to send it in. However, I'm thinking if you open it up yourself and botch a repair job they'll just send you your broken box right back with a note asking if that was supposed to be funny and you'll have to buy one retail.

If you REALLY want to take a stab at it, I suggest doing this:

http://xbox360fixit.com/Xbox-360-Repair-Videos

Sorry that happened! I've had two bite the dust. I think it's sad that I have a 20+ y/o 8bit nintendo that works fine and these $300 pos's can't last a fraction of that time.

I did a lot of google, youtube, and craigslist searches to try and fix them. The first one I sent to a repair place, the second one I ended up buying another broken one and frankensteining one good console out of the wreckage.

Good luck

OnB,

You make a good point about the old systems. I'm sure Microsoft didn't put as much effort into properly cooling the machines as they could have, but the tech inside the Xbox that's throwing off all that heat is also responsible for the awesome graphics and stuff these new consoles can do. A hockey buddy of mine is a chip developer for smartphones (sort of the same thing in this case) and he says they're constantly walking a razor thin line between performance and ergonomics vs proper cooling.

Mattack,
I hear you when you say repair by Microsoft is best, but I'd much rather pony up a little more and get a new system instead of sending it away. The way I figure it, I'll try to resurrect my system using the guide on that website (thank you, by the way), and if it's still dead, I'll go save up for a new console. I'm fully aware that by opening up the console and tinkering with the guts, I risk irreparable harm. I'm cool with that.

I'm willing to take the risk and am prepared to buy a new console if I mess it up. Thanks for the guide, that was exactly what I was looking for. All of the other ones I was finding seemed like scams.

I'm going out of town (back to Cleveland, actually) at the end of this week, so I'll keep you guys updated with the outcome, whenever I happen to finish up.



Update: Just FYI, I did a little searching, and found that Microsoft charges $99 for repairs to fix RRoD and other related problems. That does not include shipping or insurance.

j/c

I had an 360 for a couple years and then it red-ringed on me....I was pretty salty, but sent it in and got it repaired for free.....then, almost exactly a year later---it red-ringed again.

I was seriously ticked off. I called MS and they said send it in---but I never really got around to it....so it just sat there for about a week......

After that week...for whatever reason, I decided to turn on the 360 to see if it was still broken---to my amazement....it worked again......and it continued to work for the next 9 months....then one day it red-ringed again and stayed that way.....

I sent it in a week later for repair and then promptly went out and bought a PS3...

When I got the 360 back I sold it to a kid at work for a hundred bucks with all the games.....

My PS3 has ran fine ever since day 1....

Moral of the story.....buy a PS3.....or......if you wanna give video games a break for quite awhile----then just wait until the next-gen consoles hit....probably in the next 2-5 years......

I've had one apart, not too tricky.

The video looks like a standard heat-sink R&R, kinda surprised that's all it takes, but apparently this is a VERY popular procedure. I do this a lot with PCs but never had the need on an X-box.

I looking at someone do it all the way through makes me feel pretty good about going through with this.

The one thing that makes me nervous is the "reflowing" method. That just sounds crazy, but I guess it's pretty easy.

Its cake with a reflow station, but those are pricey and not worth buying unless its for a business venture. You can buy a lot of consoles for what one reflow station costs. Doing it with a heat gun would work in theory, but it would be so dangerous to the rest of the console I'd never recommend it. Those things are meant for tasks like removing paint, not precise work like this.

Let me know how the X-clamp surgery turns out, watching a guy who's done it a thousand times do it makes it look easy, but I'm sure its not

Well that was fast....

I got the motherboard totally out of the casing, and was trying to pry off the tabs that anchor the heat sinks. Those are pretty robust, and I slipped and knocked a tiny capacitor off of the bottom of the motherboard.

So now I have to take it into the R&D lab at work and see if I can solder it back on under a microscope (not very confident in my soldering abilities with something so small). Or I could bribe one of the techs working in there.

The good part was, once I got the heatsinks off, I could see the problem immediately. The thermal paste was definitely shot. Looked terrible, and made a mess at some point all over the immediate area around the GPU. I'll get that cleaned up tomorrow at the lab.

I saw a video of a guy doing it with a heat gun.

Half the video is him prepping by covering everything other than the GPU and CPU. He wraps all those nearby capacitors in bubble wrap, then foil. My guess is you heat up those capacitors and they'll explode.

My first ever experiment was when I was 16 years old. Got a job at a fast food joint and saved money all summer, bought parts for a nice powerful gaming computer and built it myself. Ended up being rather easy, just fitting pieces of a puzzle together. I had also just learned to solder in my electronics class in school, so I had enough (misguided) confidence to try a more difficult task. I decided to try my hand at overclocking, which at that time meant connecting the l1 bridges on my shiny new AMD Athlon cpu...yeah, that did not end well. Little bit of smoke and some not so good sounds that computers aren't supposed to make when I turned it on for the first time... and a ruined motherboard and cpu. The caps on the motherboard looked like popped popcorn

But I did learn a lot. Enough to respect the difficulty, and to know better than to try it without the proper tools. You should have seen my first "soldering iron" I wouldn't know half the stuff I know now if I had not been willing to risk it giving it a shot, so I can understand where you're coming from, just be careful, as you seem to have just found out for yourself

Yeah,

Optimism for getting the Xbox running again is running pretty low right now. I'm pretty busy at work so I probable won't pick it up until I get back from vacation on the 15th. Getting this cap soldered back into place sounds like a job for a technician buddy of mine at work. I can solder, but not this tiny little thing.