Xbox 360 Failure: the cause and what you can do about it
So your Xbox 360 went kaptuz eh? Sadly this is the case with millions of fellow gamers, so you are not alone in your strife.
You are probably scratching your head at just what went wrong, and certainly it could be a number of things.
Here are the Xbox 360 failures you may experience:
Red ring of death (3 red lights on the display)
1 red light error
2 red light error
4 red light error
Graphics freezing
Disk read error
The most common Xbox 360 failure by far is the red ring of death. Although the 1 red light error is a close second.
The 2 red light error is a problem caused by too much heat on the motherboard. All you have to do is let your system cool down. If the problem persists, applying the same fix (as explained below) for the 1 and 3 red light Xbox 360 failure will fix your problem.
The 1 red light problem is not readily understood (even by the Microsoft staff) but it seems to be any number of general hardware or software failures. This can usually be fixed with the 3 red light repair method.
So what is the red ring of death?
This is an offspring of Microsoft trying to jump into the next generation of consoles too fast. In their haste, they made the cooling unit, the heat sink, too small to keep the motherboard cool.
Now motherboards overheat like crazy, and this overheating causes the x-clamps (on the back of the motherboard) to flex the motherboard up and down. This flexing action weakens the soldering which holds the GPU (graphic processing unit). The GPU eventually comes loose and you get the 3 red light (or sometimes 1 or 2) Xbox 360 failure.
To fix this problem you simply need to adjust where the heat sinks rest on the motherboard so the heat is relieved and the flexing does not cause the GPU to come loose.
You can fix your busted Xbox 360
The good news is the repair is simple. You can take it apart with a torx t10 and t8 screwdriver, and easily fix this problem in under an hour once you are set up.
Be careful NOT to get desperate and try the towel fix. That will only make matters worse.
Best of luck with your repair.
