Okay, so I bought a Xbox, been wanting one for ages now. Great stuff, did some laps in Forza 2, just as my career in Forza was looking up. Bam. 3 Little red lights. Do any of you guys have any experience with the common Xbox problem? I have dropped it off at Pinnacle. R350 to fix. Is there a way to make sure that it does not happen again, or have I wasted my money where I could have spend it on fishy stuff?:bigsmile: Thanx Any advice would be appreciated!
Dude, surely that machine is still under warranty so why did you take it to Pinnacle? Depending on the exact error, it might be permanently fixed, depending on their methods. You should have checked the error code before giving it in, then I couldn't have offered more insight. There are a number of RROD errors, some of them not even fatal, people just seems to jump to conclusions much too quickly.
Did you buy it new or second hand? If it was new, the store you bought it from should replace the whole unit. You phone the microsoft xbox customer care line and they will give you a ref number and you give that to the store you bought it from... They in turn give you a brand new Xbox. If it was second hand and out of it's 2 year guarantee, then you must cough up.
Unfortunately all swop outs are now handled directly by the distributor, which is Powercare for the moment while someone else takes over from MiDigital, hopefully Comztek. There is also a 3-year warranty specifically for RROD faults, and a normal 1-year warranty for everything else.
Thanx for the points raised guys. I bought it second hand. Pinnacle phoned me now, its the thermal paste problem, should be sorted early next week. Cant wait! :bigsmile: Now just to find a second hand hard drive, entry level Xbox FTL!:redface:
If it's only the thermal paste problem there's a good chance it should stay fixed, depending on how they go about it. The biggest problem is if the motherboard was under flex, and the solder joints pulled out, no way of fixing that without very expensive tools, and no real way of guaranteeing the work. If you aren't scared of importing, Play-Asia have 60Gb drives + 3 Months Live membership for about R700.
You have to buy a "VGA cable" which goes for around R350. That provides an "analog" D-SUB connection.
From what I understand there's no permanent fix for any of the rrod problems. The only permanent fix is to replace the GPU or to re-ball it (I think this is where they fix/replace the pins on the chip). If anyone is in the market for a new Xbox, make sure that it's the latest build (Jasper). I think most of the XBox Pro's are Jaspers...not sure about the Elite version. At the moment, most of the Arcade editions are the old builds (Zephyr and Falcon). There's a way to identify this without opening the box. PM me if you want to know. My xbox is an old build (built in 2006) and I have already had and fixed the rrod. I've now got another problem (E74 error) with it and have been patching it up, but doubt that it'll work for much longer.
As Rory stated buy the VGA cable. An HDMI 2 DVI cable should in theory also work just fine for a PC-monitor with DVI, but I'm not sure what resolution options it will give you. You'd need to keep the Component/Composite cable connected to the machine for sound though, which involves breaking the casing off.
