Blagged

Eight cents! Yes you read that correctly. Today I was watching TV via the Media Center Extender that’s built into the Xbox 360. After about five minutes, the video went all screwy, locked up, and was accompanied by quite the screeching sound. I promptly turned the 360 off, and when I turned it back on, I was presented with the same garbled video and lock up, before it even got to the dashboard! Fearing that my 360 was completely boned, I left it off for a while. When I tried it again later, same garbage. Now I was beginning to dread that my 360 was in the makings of the 3 Red Rings of Death, which indicate a general hardware failure (for most consoles, this is caused by the GPU and it’s RAM chips obtaining a tiny fracture in some of their solder points). I talked to this guy, and he confirmed my suspicions, as he himself has fixed two 360’s with the same problem. So, with all of this at hand, I decided to fix it myself using what’s called the “12 cent fix”. Even though the guide I used suggests using twelve pennies, I ended up using only eight as per recommendation by said fellow. The process involves wrapping the pennies in stacks of two with electrical tape, and then applying them to the bottom of the mainboard where the video RAM chips lie. Once those are in place and the 360 is back together, you need to overheat the sucker to allow the solder to heat up and sort of connect back up. Sounds crazy, but seems to be working so far! The fans are louder now, which I believe is due to a crappy contact between the CPU, GPU, and their respective heatsinks. If I run into any overheating issues, I’ll likely open the 360 back up, and put some fresh, high quality thermal compound on the heatsinks and see if that help. For now, I’ll just keep playing on the now loud, but working Xbox 360.