So Long, Xbox 360….

Hope you called them first and got things arranged, as today is May 13th.  Oh no, Friday the 13th!

I've been sitting on my 2nd replacement 360 for a good two years now...hopefully it stands the test of time.

This is your 3rd replacement, right ID?

Tempted to get a 360 again with the PSN outage lasting into its 4th week.

If it's not back up by the time I get back from my trip- Sony makes my boycott list.

It's interesting to see how often these consoles get messed up on people. The red ring of death stories I have seen seem waaaay to common for my taste. Did the Atari's and Coleco's have these many problems back then? I can't remember.

Hope you did what LightStar said and good luck.

Therefore I play PC 

Nah....all the Atari's and Coleco's did was burn an impression on your TV's picture tube after awhile. Worked fine but try watching TV with meteors and googly spaceships flitting around.

Nah..... ya can't beat the good 'ol playstation I have 1 and 2  and never had a problem  with them and I have had the ps1  for over ten plus years and  the ps2 I have had about 8 or 9 years and they are still going strong

yep hope you did

cause most things like this you have to get a number and ship it just as they say to but I am sure you know this... good luck 

wow my SP2 still works well most of the time..

I had to send in my Hard drive it was a 400GB WD and had to put this # on 3 sides of it and ship in back to them packed better then they packed it too begin with the HD could not move inside the box at all.. and I even keep all my Electronic Boxes so I had to put bubble wrap in it  but they sent me back a 500GB  WD and now I don't even use it .. 

Funny, when I was younger, I had both Atari and Coleco, and played it quite a lot, but never burned anything into my TV. I suppose if you left the game running without actually playing it for hours, it would burn into the screen.

SP2

oh wow on one of the GTA game want to say the vice City you had to use the Camera and it burned the camera image on my T.V. good thing I could not see it when the T.V. was on but it sure did show up perfect when it was off...  oh and I did not pulse the game on the camera...

This is my second Xbox, this replaced the first one with the exact same error that unfortunately wasn't in warranty.  It seems Microsoft extended this error to the 3 year warranty as well.  I just thought it was funny it happened on the night before the warranty expired.

It's already at UPS shipped out with a repair order.  It cost me nothing but a few bucks to have it packed up.

I remember seeing some burned in numbers and icons on the TV we had at home when I was little. My sister played a lot of pac-man back then on our atari 5200 and she was so good she would get to the last level which was a key and from them get infinite keyes as them ghost just couln't catch her. This in turn caused the long line of keyes to be burned onto the bottom of the TV sometimes (not permanent though) and her enormous high score. lol.

Maybe it was the TV model we each had perhaps some were more prone to be permanent or not burn at all than others.

I miss my PS2, I loved playing Vice City and San Andreas on it. Matter of fact i think those are the only console games I liked and was willing to buy a console for myself to play. Wouldn't mind having a PS2 with those games right now, been a while.

Play the lottery.  Immediately.

Heh... I'm on my 5th 360... ffs.  All is well since I've picked up the slim, though. 

We have 2 360's in the house.  An older one (my daughter's second-revision) which suffered the "red-ring-o-death" and a new one (mine).  When my daughter's 360 suffered the RROD I voided the warranty (there is no way I'm sending something away and waiting forever to get it or maybe a refurb back) and completely took it apart.  I removed the x-clamp holding the heatsinks down and cleaned the crappy "thermal-tape" off of the die's and gave the entire area a nice isopropyl bath.  I then used a non-curing thermal compound I use in all of my PC's called STG-1 from Zalman (applied a very thin layer with the supplied nail-polish-type-brush and then re-assembled the xbox.  Since I caught the problem in my daughter's 360 early enough before too much heat-flexing had taken place on the board etc. her 360 has worked flawlessly ever since.

Eventhough my 360 is (I think the 4th or even 5th revision) I immediately took it apart (brand new and yes voided the warranty) cleaned the useless thermal-tape, gave it the same isopropyl bath, applied Zalman STG-1, reassembled and it also has worked flawlessly eversince.

the Monk

Gutsiest move I've ever seen.

I have found that the xbox 360 slim fixed all the major issues with the previous version and runs a whole hell of a lot better.  Ironically I have been playing the Lego Pirates game and it is quite good.  Due to needing different people to do certain things in each level it definitely has its replayability value because it requires you to do it several times or just waiting until you have all the crew type members you need to do it.  With all the replaying of just the stuff in the first film I have only just completed the first film storywise this morning but need some crew members from the second movie to finish up all the extra stuff in Pirates 1.  And furthermore still won't be able to complete all the levels in Part 1 completely until I get who I need to have Blackbeard's sword to unlock the final stuff.

On the subject of the xbox.  I have bought the new version and use it wifi and got the kinect as a gift.  I only have two games for the connect.  Adventures does tire you out in fifteen minutes unless you are a youngin.  Yoostar 2 is interesting but hard.  

My roommate is currently using the old 360 and had to have it replaced twice or fixed.  I don't know what they did but it seems to be working fine now.  

And for the person who says that who knows how long it would take them to fix it.  For me both times I think it was fixed and back to me within 2 weeks even though they say three I think.  

And the first versions of the xbox I think all had the E73 error.  The second versions I don't know.  But again the slim seems to be working fine.  The only issue I have had so far is that if where you have it is not well ventilated you netflix movies and games might lock up.  But just turn it off and turn it back on and also put it on its side (hot dog style)  On the new ones vents are on the wide sides so it needs the air vents accessible and it will probably not freeze.  There are also vents on the top and bottom but one of those (bottom has feet on them so you know which way to stand it.  You can lay it flat but I think it gets overheated too fast that way.  

Okay I have rambled on enough.  Sorry.

Again,  it's not a ventilation issue.  If you actually take a 360 completely apart you'll know why I say that.  The reason most of them had the error relating to the graphics chip was as follows:

1.  The crappy "thermal-tape" used wasn't effective enough at transferring heat from the chips (cpu and gpu) to the heatsinks.

2.  The crappy X-clamp design of holding the heatsinks onto the 360 mainboard didn't take into account what might happen if the board were to flex.....say from excessive heat.

So we had this happening:

1.  The crappy thermal-tape couldn't do it's job well enough so the chips/board got too hot

2.  This caused the board to flex

3.  This caused the stupid X-clamp to no longer have the heatsinks forced down onto the chips with enough force!

4.  This caused the GPU to overheat in seconds, freeze and throw the error code about a GPU error!

Some people on the internet even suggested wrapping the xbox in a towel and forcing it to overheat (the entire xbox instead of just the graphics chip and the area on the board around the chip).  This worked usually for about a week or two because what those people essentially did was to warp the ENTIRE 360 mainboard in the hopes that the heatsink and clamp would straighten out a bit.

The only way to correctly fix the problem/issue is to do exactly what I described in my earlier post.  Something I haven't only performed on my own xbox's but also on those of friends and family with a 100% success-rate.   edit:  oh and no two-week waiting period!  hehe 

the Monk 

That sucks and good timing well for the warrenty. 

To this day I have killed off 3-4 xboxs if I remember right (one was a Elite version too).  It sucks when you lose your system before a nice game launch. The total death count between my friends is around 15...  We even had two systems die at the same time (remember my buddies shipping those out ). 

I really don't play my xbox at all anymore (only for Forza 3 cat and mouse, a few games of cod, and a few games of halo which is rare).

This is one of the reasons why I love Nintendo. It's just nearly impossible to break their products.

Just google the Gulf War Gameboy.

Hm. I get hardware failure all the time. I just make it work. Usually holding the disk drive while my Xbox starts does the trick. If fingers are insufficient, jamming a knife in the crack takes care of it, but that has potential to scratch up the disk label, which while purely cosmetic is something I'd rather avoid if doing so is trivial. I view it as much the same as blowing dust out of old nintendo consoles, or working around bugs on PC titles. I don't mind any of those things compared to Sony's horrible security practices giving away credit card information, or any other awful worst-case dooms-day scenario we could dream up.