Reclaim the wireless controller module from a broken Xbox 360

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If you're one of the hordes whose Xbox 360 died the fiery death associated with the RRoD you may be wondering what to do with that multi-hundred dollar door stop you're left with. Why not salvage the parts for other uses? If you've ever wanted to use your wireless controller with a computer here's a way to pull out the RF module and reuse it. The concept is simple enough, there's a … [Read more...]

GPU cooling to fix RRoD

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[Rbz] fixed his friend's Red Ring of Death stricken Xbox 360 by improving the GPU cooling. Because an overheating GPU is a common cause of the failure, he first tried to replace the thermal compound for better heat conductivity between the chip and the heat sink. This helped a bit but within two hours the problem was back. Troubled by the heat discoloration on the bottom of the DVD drive, he … [Read more...]

Microsoft sorta explains E74 errors

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Last month we speculated on the recent rise in Xbox 360 E74 errors. We assumed that this was because of an increase in the number of HDMI consoles and that the associated scalar chip was failing. Unfortunately since these weren't red ring failures, they didn't fall into the extended three year warranty period for Xbox 360s. That is until this week when Microsoft admitted that some E74 errors are … [Read more...]

Hackit: Xbox 360 hardware failures on the rise?

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Joystiq has been tracking the new starlet of Xbox 360 failures: the E74 error. It appears as the lower right light on the console turning red and an on-screen message telling the user to contact support with the error E74. The number of reported E74 errors seems to have risen since August 2008 and people are wondering if the more recent increase in errors are related to the release of the New Xbox … [Read more...]