Tales of an Xbox 360 Repair

A terrible thing happened to me yesterday: my xbox 360 broke down. On the very first day on my Christmas vacation, after playing Skyrim for an hour or so the screen went funny, so I decided to restart the console. I turned it back on and, to my horror, the screen was blank. I unplugged it, cleaned it the best I could, but all to no avail. It was at that moment when the cruel realisation that my much loved xbox may not be coming back that an anguished cry escaped my quivering lips. After desperately searching for ways to fix it on the internet and I spending hours scouring the streets of my city for the correct screwdrivers and some thermal compound to repair the connection between the GPU and the motherboard, the repair started.

It took me the good part of an afternoon to take it apart, made all the more difficult as my eyes blurred with tears at the thought of losing what I had come to feel was less like a machine and more like an extension of my own body. When I struggled to remove the x-clamps from the motherboard, I managed to take some skin off my hand with a screwdriver. I thought as long as I could revive her, the blood and the pain I now suffered would be worth it.

I cleaned the GPU, CPU and related heat sinks as a father might tenderly wash his child's scraped knee after a fall. Then I tentatively, delicately, applied the thermal compound to the chips; spreading it as evenly as I could with an unwanted store loyalty card. After reassembling the console sans its outer casing the moment I had been dreading had arrived: the overheating.

I connected the power supply and unhooked the fan - although it pained me to inflict this on my baby there could be no other way if I wanted the compound to set. 15 minutes the online help guides had said, just 15 minutes, but when it came down to it the time drew out like a dagger drawing across my heart. What would I do with my xbox, without hearing the happy squeal of its fans as I turned on to escape from the miseries of human existence? Though I’m not religious, I uttered a small prayer that God may save my console from a purgatory of being designed to play games and yet no longer being able to. Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, the overheating and subsequent half an hour of cooling was done.

My fingers trembled as I reached to turn it on, my head dizzied by a mixture of terrible anxiety and a slight glimmer of cautious optimism. Could I have revived it? May my terribly shoddy DIY skills performed a miracle? Only this moment could tell. My finger made contact with the button.

I saw the green light in the centre; would it spread to outer circle letting me know my console was okay, or would the circle turn red - letting me know the console was gone and nothing more could be done? My heart was pounding, never before I had felt such an intense feeling of nervousness. Then, it happened.

The red ring stared at me smugly, mockingly; glaring malevolently at this deflated soul who had been crushed in defeat. I had thought myself Dr. Frankenstein, able to conjure life from the husks of the dead through pseudo-science and sorcery, but I had come to realise I had been nothing more than a hopeful - now hopeless - fool. My crying began in earnest, my tears falling heavily on the console’s chalky death-like white exterior. I grabbed a black fabric “bag for life” that I saw near and tore it to become one black sheet, and then draped the bag-come-shroud over the shell of my xbox. “Goodbye sweet friend,” I whispered, almost incapable of speech, “I’ll never forget you.” I was not only my xbox that died yesterday, but part of my soul as well.

So there you have it, a dramatised account of my failed xbox repair. If you can’t tell I’m bored without an xbox to play on! I’ll probably just buy another second hand old model with Christmas money and attach the hard drive. Anyone else had similar experiences of a well loved piece of electronics dying on them or is there no one else who can share my pain?

 

My fleshlight broke down once.

 

Jojobobo uses Wall of Text!
It's Super Effective!
You take 999 damage.
You have fainted!

 

Hey whoa, it's no longer than TDC's recent messages! Seeing as there's no love for the thread however next time I'll keep my bored ramblings to myself.

 

Maybe we just don't care as much about consoles as you do.

 

Honestly I don't care that much, I just thought the dramatised approach would be more humurous. I would play some PC games but I've played all my favourites to death in recent years; I thought about taking up the Arcanum scavengar hunt again but I do have work to do this holiday and I want to come back to it with enthusiam so I thought I'd give it a little while.

 

Well, as a text I really liked it. You made something rather dull slightly interesting.

 

oh, I was drunk and exhausted. Don't take it personally. I think my post in TDC's thread was "tl;dr."

 

I read and was amusing, but have nothing else to contribute. My shit always works.

 

Well I'm glad it was well received! People seem to be worried about the lack of activity here as of late so I thought I'd post something semi-interesting up, and besides that the only other thing I seem to post up is generic threads about books and films so I thought I'd kick the habit.

Don't worry I didn't; I'm sure you posted something very similar in one of previous threads and I posted some weak response about throwing in some arbitrary paragraphs.

 

My Amiga died when I was nine or so. No big deal, really.

Just kidding, I was devastated.

Years have passed and now I have been able to fire up some of my childhood games on a PC thanks to the blessing of emulators. Some games are yet to be found and emulated properly, while some are probably lost for me forever, seeing how I don't exactly remember how some of those titles went.

 

Well at least someone can feel my pain; I mourn your loss Muro.

 

I loved Impossible Mission. "Another visitor, stay a while.... Stay forever!"

 

I know. It is an awesome game. If only it was not that hard to get the password to finish the game. Did someone ever finished that game? Me neither. At that time I had a black and white monitor. So that means it was a bit hard to know which color you need at the right place.

It was even harder to finish a level of Aztec Challenge. Yes. The one with the piranhas. Because it was black and white you could not see them at all. It was sudden death at all times.

It was not that my c64 broke down, but it was the fact that there were no longer games for this computer avaible anymore. Luckily, you can use an emulator these days. But it quite not what it used to be.

 

I recently needed to use a 10 year old PC that had sat in a closet for the last six months. I took it out (of the closet, ha!) and plugged it all in, and turned it on (with my gayness, ha!) and heard a dreaded beep sequence. Slow beeps over and over again. Something was wrong. So I looked up beep sequences on the Innernet and it suggested "RAM problem". Somewhere in the back of my mind the phrase "re-seat the RAM, dude" wafted through my consciousness, so I took the case off, took out the RAM, gave it a blowj... erm... I mean, blew on it a bit, and re-inserted it. Then I turned the PC on again, and heard the glorious single beep of start-up goodness, followed by the familiar boot screen, etc.

This story was not really as compelling or as well-written as Jojomojo's but at least mine had a happy ending. (A happy ending! ha!)

Also, I don't understand the physics of what occurred - why would taking the RAM out and putting it back in again fix anything? Am I going to die?

 

One can only hope.

 

First thing that comes to mind is that the RAM stick was inserted loosely enough for the PC not to detect it and act as if it weren't there, no RAM being the RAM problem here.

 

Yeah, but it wasn't really inserted loosely in the first place. In fact I probably haven't touched the RAM for several years. The only thing that's happened to that computer since recently is that it's been used as a chair, probably kicked a bit, driven a hundred miles or so in a car with rigid suspension, and been lifted up and set down repeatedly.

I really can't think of anything that would have caused the RAM to loosen.

 

A mystery indeed. Death it is then.

 

Perhaps you can find them here: http://www.lemonamiga.com/ or http://eager.back2roots.org/