Flashing torture

So yea, I was in the middle of a fast paced game of Halo 3 when I got a crap load of artifacting and then it froze, when I switch it back on again guess what happened, I got the dreaded Red Ring Of Death, three red lights or simply RROD. I had a mess about and it worked again for a few minutes until it froze, now all I ever get is the 3 LEDs blinking a horrible shade of red.

My xbox is no new model either, it has survived so far with no red rings, no scratching of disks or anything and looking at the back it seems it was manufactured in 2006, launch model I believe and therefore has weathered the storm of RROD criticism well. Sadly it does mean that my warranty is well and truly over and I have no hope of a replacement from Microsoft. So basically I’m pretty much screwed and I was going to go out and buy a new console today as I am shamelessly addicted to Halo, however it seems there are a couple of avenues open to me and I will probably try them all before I go out and buy a new one, although, having two xboxes might be nice 😀

Option 1: The Towel Fix
This involves wrapping up the xbox in some towels and leaving the console on for about half an hour. This makes the xbox cook in it’s own juices and heat up to a very high temperature then leaving it to coool. Apparently the RROD issue is caused by the “X-Clamp” processor sinks becoming loose or losing complete contact with the processor bed. Somehow the heat causes the chips to settle in again but is supposedly a temporary fix. I was thinking of banging it in the fridge afterwards to set it a little better. Maybe it will work I don’t know, but either way I’ll update here with what happened with the towels. Don’t worry I’ll have a bucket of water on standby in case it sets itself on fire.

Option 2: Fix the X-Clamp

Repair Kit

There are lots of guides online on how to open up your xbox and replace a loat of small nuts, bolts and washers to fix the heatsink issues of the “X-Clamp” it does take an hour or so to do but people swear by it. The main problem is having all the parts, thankfully there are many dealers on ebay who are selling all the correct parts to repair the box and quite cheap. If the towel trick doesn’t work I will buy the kit, put on my working gloves and operate on the box, it’s probably a much more efficient solution than buying a new console.

And that’s about the size of it, I’ll report back to you after the towel trick with photos so you can see how it goes. Hopefully it will not be a post entitled “I killed my xbox” and of course I will continue to look into other resolutions to the situation, and ooh this site looks like a good place to start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcyYG-boWvM