Fixed the Xbox 360 3RLOD!!!!!!

I can hardly believe it. Yesterday my xbox 360 was strewn across the basement floor in about a zillion pieces, heat sinks, t-8 and t-10 bolts all over the place. Little bits of metal everywhere as I drilled all kinds of holes in the case and guts and ripped out the fan grill in back in an effort to get more air moving around in there.

After a trip to The Source (heatsink paste) Home Depot (useless! no metric machine screws there! is this Canada or what?) and then Canadian Tire (they got metric, shoulda gone there first!) and $10 in nuts and bolts and washers later, I started in on replacing Microsoft's stupid X-clamps in the 360 with a home-brew design I got off a website. The MS X-clamps are a stupid design flaw that fails when the motherboard warps due to excess heat in the box when it starts pushing too many polygons around on the screen. The GPU and CPU move due to the warping and lose contact with the pins and you get the famous 3 ring lights of death and a $500 doorstop if you voided the warranty by not keeping your paws out of the console like I did when I first got it.

Thank god for sites like Xbox-scene! It was good to know that 300 people in the world had the same problem I did and only 16 of them didn't get it working after the fix. Microsoft's evil plans for global warming foiled again! (you should see how hot this thing gets!)

This will alleviate much anguish in the Zartimus household as the eldest could not play her Surf's up game for 3 days!

It's good to be a geek!