Matthew Knott

A tale of love, loss, grief and sorrow. No, it's not the latest Jilly Cooper novel but rather the story of my Xbox 360 and the Red Ring Of Death.

If you've suffered from the dreaded Red Ring of Death and have a 360 not covered by warranty, read on and find how to cure your woes. Also, read my thoughts on whether or not Sony is the new Sega

Prologue 

How would you feel if you'd written a loved one off as dead, put it to the back of your mind and replaced them with someone younger and slimmer. Then, a year into your new relationship you realise your old love wasn't dead after all, just in a coma, waiting for the brain to reset itself.

Well, take those emotions and bring the with you on the less dramatic story of what happened to my xbox 360.

Act 1: Fare Thee Well

Nearly two years ago, playing happily on the 360, Army of Two as I recall, when it started to freeze up. After a few restarts I was the lucky recipient of cirque rouge du mort, or red ring of death (aka RROD). Aware of the fault and it's terminal implications, and that my 360 was out of warranty, it was curtains for the beloved but troublesome console, and I consigned it to the wardrobe, living out my gaming needs on the mac for several months, before buying a PS3.

Over the coming months, I sorted out some belongings for the charity shops (hard drive was used as trade-in fodder, one controller gifted to sisters boyfriend, one sold on amazon, HD-DVD drive sold, remote sold). The console and remaining parts were then packed up when we moved and forgotten about. Seasons passed, games releases came and went. Grand Theft Auto 4, the PS3 release was such a let down from the fact it was so damn blurry, compared to the taunting crispness of the 360 version. I pushed all thoughts of planing my own 360 again to a recess in my mind, soothing myself with lies that the PS3 will get better, it will at some stage out muscle the venerable Xbox in terms of graphical supremacy. But it hasn't, and I doubt it will.

Act 2: Winds of Change

Fast forward to today, George Bush is long gone, and the world is a duller, safer place. People have relaxed back into monotonous repetitive jobs, feeling somewhat safer that America won't destroy the world just yet. A sense of optimism grows in the people, they start to have ideas, creativity begins to grow like a grass shoot amongst arid desert, and a boy has a dream, to type "red ring of death" into eBay and see what comes back. There was an answer, RROD Fix Kit.

The kit consisted of thermal paste, 8 x 5mm thick bolts, 26 washers, and no instructions. With the valued assistance of youtube, and another website, I took these parts, and managed to vanquish the redness from my ring.

I'll briefly summarise the steps I went through:

• Firstly, removed the motherboard from the case.
• Removed the X-Clamps from both heatsinks.
• Cleaned old thermal paste from the heatsinks and also the chips themselves with industrial cleaning fluid (Orangey smelling stuff 3M make that my brother-in-law game me, amazing stuff).
• Applied a fresh even layer of quality thermal paste to the processors
• Screwed the heatsinks to the case in the order of screw, washer, motherboard, washer, washer, heatsink.
• Tightened to a reasonable level, and replaced motherboard.

At this stage, the video and many other people recommend a deliberate overheating of certain components to fuse them back to the board, this worried me so I thought I'd give it a try. I still had the RROD. I remembered reading that you should apply pressure to each heatsink in turn, to find which is loose or requires extra pressure. I placed moderate force on the CPU heatsink and powered on, no RROD and the console booted for the first time in nearly 2 years. The elation and emotion is difficult to describe, welcome back old friend.

Next I wanted to find the weak corner, so applied a small amount of force to a rather hot heatsink in one corner. Powered on, worked great. I then though, before I change anything, just to turn it on, it worked! I put the duct back on and replaced the drive on top of it, and put the top of the case back on, tried it again, still working!

I've now just completed a 45 minute test run, and forgot how loud the thing got after being on for 90 seconds, but the hurricane in my ear was drowned out by the gospel choir in my heart and the smile on my face. With so much going wrong recently, this small victory means so much to me.

Epilogue

More of a final thought, but I think Sony seem to be forgetting a significant part of history they were involved in, in relation to the PS3 V's 360 saga.

The period I'm referring to is the release of the original PlayStation up against the Sega Saturn. Sega's console ultimately failed because it was more expensive than it's competitor, and alienated developers with it's awkward hardware setup. Despite having what on paper was better hardware, there was very little to distinguish the Saturn from the PlayStation. In the end, the number of titles for Sony's console grew while Sega went quietly into that good night and never really recovered.

We now see a reversal of fates. Sony's complicated hardware platform that is the cell processor powered PS3, against the far simpler to develop for 360. There is nothing in the hardware aside form Blu-Ray, nothing. The PS3 is quieter and has a better feature set in the interface, but Sony are still not doing the store basics right.

I genuinely think the 360 will stand toe-to-toe with the PS3 for many a year, and suspect MS may leapfrog Sony with updated hardware and better user experience. Either way I'm not going to be on the winning side, being a double-agent and all. Good health people, and good night.