XBOX Necromancy

I really overdid it yesterday, and this morning I am paying the price. I am kind of sitting here in an extended allergy inflamed stupor. I quite honestly had forgotten about blogging until my wife reminded me to do so. It is a relatively cheery Sunday morning outside, which is a stark contrast to the stormy night we had last night. Breakfast is now digesting, and it is time for me to think of something worth writing.

Tales of a Junktown Trader

Yesterday after milling around a bit and blogging I went upstairs and tore into my office. It tends to be a catch all for things that need to be removed from the rest of the house. Generally things migrate there in the form of these miscellaneous boxes of debris that has not really been sorted. Since previously I had packed up all of my classic consoles in boxes to clear out the loft, I now had tons of these boxes sitting in the way of progress.

At some point soon, hopefully Thursday… I need to call the cable company to get them to install cable to both my office and the loft. This is part of the greater scheme of switching off of DSL and onto 50 meg cable. Thursday is when we get the new sectional delivered for the downstairs, and since I will have to be there anyways it would be nice to get it all over in one day. With this time table in mind I knew I realistically had to get my office in order this weekend.

Essentially I sorted through the boxes, tossed anything that was essentially unusable junk, donated anything that would be valuable to someone, and kept anything I really needed. The end results was the above picture… essentially a jeep load full of stuff going to goodwill. There are roughly 9 boxes of stuff, 2 partial cpus, a HP LaserJet printer and a floor lamp. This was the culmination of 3 1/2 hours of hardcore cleaning.

The hardest part was trying to make sure I did not junk up my game loft too badly. After all the cleaning was finished I set forth trying to resurrect my Xbox 360 so it could join the ps3 in the loft. Basically my Xbox unit is old enough that it is no longer covered by Microsoft for the Red Ring of Death fix. As a result I was basically left with the options of trying to perform rocket surgery on it, or one of the various homebrew “fixes” that have circulated around the internet.

The most notorious method is the towel trick, but I was really wanting to avoid that as I could totally picture my office going up in flames as the towels caught on fire. So the first homebrew method I tried was the “Better than towel trick” method. It made sense enough, so I doctored some qtips and proceeded to block the fans. However after 30 minutes… my unit had still not flipped to the 2 lights shown in the video. So the better than… method had failed me massively.

Next I tried this truly insane Rube Goldberg method… it has 15 steps… none of which are explained clearly. However oddly enough I was able to get my unit to respond as expected until about halfway through the maneuver. Firstly it took me a bit to figure out that they were calling the reset button… the panic button. Once that was determined the method just became technically difficult and far less mind boggling. Of course, as expected it didn’t actually do anything at all, except make my power button look like a red strobe light.

Finally I decided what the hell… I would try the towel trick. This is the most famous of the towel trick videos, but there are literally hundreds of them. Basically the idea is to wrap your xbox in a towel, force it to overheat… and this somehow resets whatever warning sensor has been flipped. I wrapped my xbox up tightly, and powered it on. I let it set for 45 minutes, and then after cooling down… it still did nothing at all. So I started doing some research… and it turns out that once again conventional wisdom is wrong.

Conventional Wisdom Wrong Again

Essentially the two red rings of death is the only error that actually means your unit has overheated. The three ring message I was seeing ultimately means “General Hardware Error”… which could literally be almost anything wrong. Basically in easiest terms my Xbox is screwed, and not likely to come back. I would have to take my unit into a repair place, and the cost of repair would be completely variable based on what was actually wrong… and ultimately I would still be left with an ancient xbox with only a 20 gig harddrive.

I did some looking around at local used game shops, and they wanted roughly 330 for a used 250 gig newer style xbox. My wife suggested that we look around at some pawn shops, and at the very first one I found a good deal on a 250 gig matte black finish newer style xbox. We went ahead and paid the extra 20 bucks for a 6 month warranty… as a just in case. I got it set up last night, and started redownloading things… and at this point I am almost back to where I was before.

I am super happy that now I have both a working PS3 and XBox up in the game loft. The next step will be to tackle getting the nettop set up and the emulators running. But that is a job that can wait for another day. I still have not decided if I will be going with windows based XBox Media Center or the Ubuntu based variety. The windows based gives me a bit more freedom to do other things, but the Ubuntu version seems more shake and bake and might take less time to configure.

Snap Crackle and Pop

I am really not sure how much will get accomplished today. Right now when I move I make a snap, crackle and pop sound… which is not amazingly good. I maybe over did it, since I hauled a load of boxes to goodwill, and another load of cardboard boxes to the recycling center by myself. I could have gotten help with both had I waited, but I wanted the upstairs to be finished… and the clutter, bags of trash and empty boxes were just making it look like a complete and total mess. We realistically need to do a few things downstairs to prep for thursday, but I am not sure how much of that will happen. I hope you all have a great day out there, and that you keep from creaking and moaning like I apparently am right now.