So after I told you in my previous post my Xbox has joined the legions that have developed the demonic red ring of death I decided I should try out the “towel trick” to get rid of those nasty red lights and get myself playing halo again.

First off we get the Xbox ready by removing the hard drive and taking it into the kitchen so in case something does go wrong I’m not going to damage anything and it’s close to a water source. You may also notice from the first picture how dirty my Xbox looks, I think it’s his age maybe I’ll give him a good clean when I’m finished.

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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

A few people have expressed an interest in my android desktop and I figured it was probably best to post all the relevant info here. Knowing me it will all have changed within a week though.

In the first picture the first thing that jumps out is the weather widget, it’s the best free one I’ve found, it’s called simply Weather Widgets Free and when you tap the widget it brings up a 4 day forecast too. It had no problem finding my location either, which you can set to use GPS to get the weather.

The other thing worth noting in the first picture is the little “1” above my message icon. This is a widget called SMS Unread Count, which shows the number of new messages waiting, it also shows dialler missed calls too.

The dock bar at the bottom is part of dxtop, the custom icons used on the home screen and the dock are from 3 different icon packs: Vista, Windows 7 & Xbox 360. dxtop allows you to change icons for anything on the desktop or in folders by long pressing.

dxtop is also responsible for the dual tabs in the second picture, the first tab is the normal application list as you can see in picture 3 it makes the list 5 items wide meaning you can see more per screen.

The second tab is a task manager tab, it shows recently used apps, running apps and apps that are running only as a service. If you take a look at the fourth screen the browser is not running but was previously used, the link text is white, dialler in red is a running program and by long pressing it we can kill the process, the weather widget is in yellow which indicates that it is only running as a service and again long pressing allows us to kill the process.

The second screenshot is merely a folder which I added to the dock, all the icons on my dock are currently folders filled with applications or shortcuts, this is built in to android. To create a folder just long press on the desktop and select new folder.

Finally, the last screenshot displays Toggle Settings which allows me to toggle things like wifi etc, I put his as a shortcut on the dock, the very last one that looks like a power button.

As the UK did not get MSN/AIM/YH integration in the android IM app we are forced to look for an alternative, and from experience meebo seems to be the best all round client.

I thought I would put up a few android reviews, first off it’s my favourite Ebay application “PKT Auction”. I was very impressed by the interface and the number of features. I especially like the minimal auction pages:

Picked one of these up the other day because I had a look at the phones Orange had on offer for me and they were pretty much crap, more than that; they wanted me to pay to upgrade my phone even though I would be starting a new contract, I was having any of that so I jumped ship.

I got it pretty much next day delivery and have been playing with it ever since. So far I’m quite impressed by the email applications and some of the fun games. I love having a full physical QWERTY keyboard and it’s nice to be able to scroll through my contacts easily. Read on for my likes/dislikes. Read more…

This man should thank his stars and garters that he survived 3 point blank shotgun blasts, 3 melee hits and more. The only real explanation for this haemorrhage inducing death is lag, for some reason the only packets my connection managed to drop were those that contained my gun and my bullets. bungie.net replay.

Also on Youtube.