My THIRD 360 just died - Page 18

My oldish 8 gb arcade model gave me the three rings last night (I just wanted to watch something on Netflix!). Thinking about it, I believe it might be the power supply, which I'll play with a little bit more tonight. If it's the common CPU/GPU error, I'm going to try and DIY it (I'm well outside of the warranty, anyway) for some grins and possibly some saved cash. If that doesn't work, I'll just get one of the newer 250 gb ones. A pain in the ass, as Dragon Age 2 is sitting in my mailbox as I type this, but oh well.

A power supply problem is easily detected by looking at the light on the power brick when you turn the console on.  If it's green when the machine is on, the power supply is fine.  

 

When mine died, I looked into the DIY "reflowing" solution that actually fixed the problem, and it was waaay out of my league.  But you may be much handier with a soldering iron than I am.  

It ended up being a power supply connection problem. The chord that goes from the wall to the adapter had come loose (oddly, the light was green instead of orange when I was troubleshooting two nights ago, but orange last night). Thankfully, all I had to do was secure the connections to get the console working again, but for some reason it feels like the plug on the adapter box isn't holding the male end of the plug in all that well. Hopefully there aren't any more problems.

Edited by D.S. Randlett - 3/10/11 at 8:37am

Huh, so I guess my RROD was hardware related after all, as I got the three lights a couple of nights ago. I looked about online, and found something that looked like it might work. I tried it last night and my machine is back up and running with no problems so far, except for a freeze during Dragon Age 2, but I think that might be software related. I guess we'll see what happens in the future. For the curious, this is the tutorial I used. It should be noted that it's slightly out of date. I poked around on the guy's MBs, and it appears that overheating the GPU is completely unnecessary for the 8GB arcade models and newer. So, if you want to try it, you just need to worry about steady hands and not melting the motherboard. I don't know if this will work with the new "slim" models, though.

 

On the whole, I'm kind of surprised that it worked. I've heard horror stories about the refurbs that MS sends out, and didn't feel like dealing with that. So, I told myself that either I fix it or save up for a few weeks and get a new one, but even that was mainly because I wanted to tinker with this machine. I fully expected myself to screw something up and then get one of the newer black models. I'm also no expert. The last time I opened up electronics like this was when I built a PC in high school (around 2003 or so), so I'm no old hat at this kind of thing.

 

Anyway, I'm glad I'm only out the 30 bucks I spent on hardware and cleaning solution and the labor I put into the fix. I'll post again in a few weeks to let everyone know how my XBOX is faring.

Yeah, judging from my experience the refurbs are just another ticking time bomb.  It was fine when it was under warranty and I didn't have to pay for it, but the last time Microsoft wanted me to pay for them to send me one.  A new slim model wasn't that much more expensive, and it has HDMI output.

Yeah, it's probably because they just replace those X-Clamps, which were the problem in the first place. If the mother board is already "saggy" from prior damage, it won't be long. The thing I like about the fix I linked to is that you're basically pulling the heat sinks down onto the CPU and GPU. But we'll see how it works going forward.

My original corded controller that came bundled with my 360 just died. My mom is taking me to the mall today to buy a new one

I was not able to convince her I needed an 80$ limited edition TRON one from eBay:(

My new controller, a rechargeable wireless special edition one:




EDIT: I just took it out of the box and noticed that it has an extremely gimmicky and cheap feeling rotating D-Pad... For effs sake, microsoft... How hard is it to get a D-Pad right? This one is loose and makes wobbly plastic noises when you push it....

EDIT 2: the left trigger is wobbly and the right trigger makes a squeaky grinding noise! Oh come on.......!!!


FINAL EDIT: somehow the buttons all are in much better condition on my six year old controller than on this new fancy one I just got. Such a disappointment
Edited by Princess Kate - 9/18/11 at 5:18pm