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No sooner had I written the previous article about my camera being cool, as it offered the potential of exploding batteries, than I turned on my xBox 360 to find that it had broken. Nothing so dramatic as blowing up, but it put three of the red lights on the front of the console which, after much googling, turns out to be a general hardware error. I can bore you with details about how to get the xBox to show you sub error codes, but you can find that elsewhere if that's your cup of tea. What is relevant here is the fact that this display of three red lights is knows and “the three red rings of death” which sounds to me like some homosexual Russian roulette game.

Still, far be it from me to turn down a challenge, so I decided to probe the three red rings of death further. Soon to learn that you can abbreviate this to rrod (red rings of death). OK, so I'm on top of the lingo, but what about the actual problem? Some further googling identifies a large number of potential fixes from wrapping your xBox in towels in order to over heat it to microwaving it. I actually think all fixes are valid as it seems that the problem is due to M$ using cheap parts in the xBox that last about long enough to see you through the warranty period. It appears the chip design and the way the heat sinks are attached are not the best and cause the motherboard to warp. I suspect the towel or microwave trick work as they temporarily bend the board back - don't know as I didn't try either of them.

Instead, I went with a solution provided by P!nk Thr3@t from i-hacked.com/360fix. Far more fun as this involves dismantling your xBox and changing parts out (well connections rather than parts). Also, the name of the game is to be left with spare parts that you take out of the 360 - now how many times have you taken something to bits, put it back together and had bits left over?

I have to admit that I was a little skeptical, however, I guess if I were to do a video, my name would be “f@t 0ld Bl0k3” which probably doesn't have the same punch as P!nk Thr3@t - maybe 30 years ago ....

Here's my series of pictures until I got bored and stopped taking any:


In case you're wondering though, it did work. Or so far so good anyway, my 360 is back up and running.