My Xbox 360 died today.
Booted early in the morning, worked just fine. Downloaded an update for a game, rebooted, hang. Rebooted, gfx problems in the bootscreen, hang. Reboot, three blinking lights of death, black screen.
Detached all hardware (including the hard drive), disconnected the power cord and power supply, waited a minuted, reassembled, rebooted, three rings of death and a black screen. Retried the same procedure from scratch, unchanged result.
Despair.
I called 1-800-4MY-XBOX and learned that I was just out of warranty. $140 + shipping for a repaired console that according to online forums has a good chance of failing soon thereafter. Ouch.
I was disappointed, my console was a launch system (manufactured in 2005) and online articled led me to believe that Microsoft had decided to repair those free of charge. Apparently mine died a little to late, because the operator told me that program had only been temporary promotion. There is a known high defect rate, but Microsoft has stopped helping folks with the problem.
Now, I've got about $1000 tied up in peripherals, the console is the center of my home media system, and yes, I could have bought the extended warranty.
It's a tough decision: a little over a year is below the use period I expect to get out of a $400 piece of hardware. Should I shell out the money, send in the system for repairs, wait two weeks and hope the replacement lasts longer? Should I just buy a new console? Should I just write off consoles as a far too expensive hobby?
I was leaning towards the latter - writing off the box and reselling the peripherals. Thinking along those lines lead to the idea that I might as well try some hardcore repairing myself, and a little research lead to this unlikely
article.
It's a noninvasive suggestion for a fix, so I had less to lose than I anticipated.
Thus the ORP set out to warmly wrap his xbox, hugged it on his lap and switched it on. I kept my hand on top - I didn't want it to get too warm. After about ten minutes, it had reached a hot but not uncomfortable temperature, and I tried switching it off and on again (while still wrapped in the towel), just to see if it would boot yet.
To my surprise, it did.
Incredulity turned into cautious rejoicing.
The first reboot still had me crashing with a graphics error in the dashboard after 5 minutes of use, but a second reboot got me past that.
Xbox Live works. A certain first person shooter works very well.
The usual explanation is bad soldered connections on the main board.
This forum has a
post that shows how lead-free solder used on the board tends to oxidize. The hypothesis is that when the box is warm enough, the metal of the solder points expands just enough to make contact.
This would also explain the high rates of failures that appeared lately and in the previous year - winter's been hard on the continental US these last few months, and condensation as a consequence of cooling and reheating would do most of its damage during the cold months here.
I am thinking of leaving my box running until the weather improves - I don't think any more extreme cool-down/heat-up cycles will benefit it, and this way, and it'll tide me over until the next gen box hits the retail channel. If the xbox dies more permanently, I'll have to to rip it open and do some hardcore reseating and resoldering.
The one remaining mystery is why this appears to hit users disproportionally often following an update - maybe the systematically weak soldering or connector is related to the Xboxes eFuses? Then again, I thought those were used sparingly, and only ever for kernel updates.
