Well, I got the Xbox 360 yesterday, it took me all of 15 minutes to take it apart. One thing I like about the 360, it’s easy to take apart. I had all sorts of issues with the Wii. Of course, I happen to have the tools available to take these types of things apart. Remember, I tinker with things constantly, so I’ve had to deal with a lot of  screw protections, so I have an entire set of bits that alleviate the pain of not having the right screw driver

The first things I tried were this:

• The blanket method – FAIL
• Overheating it by disconnecting the fans – FAIL
• Replaced the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU with Arctic Silver, which I happened to have laying around  – Not sure yet. I put the CPU heat sink on the incorrect way as you can see in my picture. This causes the box to go directly to the 2 RROD overheating. I don’t know why, because the heatsink is still making contact with the CPU and it took much longer to overheat before when I disconnected the fans. Perhaps the X-Clamps aren’t connecting correctly. I will update this post once I’ve tested this completely. Seems like it did not work, but the fan has gotten considerably quieter. This means that the thermal paste originally on the 360 is garbage.

So, the next few things to try are going to be X-Clamp mods, I’m still going to play with overheating the box before I purchase other hardware to do those mods. The good thing is, it looks like no one has even touched the inside of this box, it’s 1 year old, and is actually an Xbox 360 Pro console with a Hitachi drive. HDMI is also there, and it came with a Wireless controller instead of a wired one which core consoles come with.

We shall see how this turns out in the coming days when I have more time to do tests on this box, if I end up being able to fix it today I will update this post. Regardless, there will be a part 2, part 2 may focus on either more attempts to fix the box or replacing the firmware with a hacked one. I will go as far as I can go with this, to the heat gun technique.

I’ve also yet to try the simplest method – swapping the Xbox 360 cables. I would *guess* that the person who owned the box tried this, but I don’t know. I’ll find someone around here with cables and try it out.

Stay tooned..

On a side note I will be upgrading my VPS memory..

I’ve told people that I wouldn’t buy an Xbox unless I found one for around $50. Well I went over that mark by about $11.

I bought a complete Core system that was broken off of eBay. I’m going to attempt to fix it, and then mod it. Engadget reported today that the new IXtreme 1.5 firmware works on basically all of the Xbox 360 drives, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

The key here is me being able to fix it, if I’m not able to, I’m not real worried. I love to experiment, it’s what I’m good at. I will keep updated posts here in the near future, this is just a heads up.  The error code as reported by the seller, (A seller that exclusively sells broken items) is E73. I’ve found the details on this here. I’m not afraid of soldering a few things if need be, I’ve already installed modchips etc. If I can’t fix it I’ll just send it right back to eBay

Should be interesting, I’m looking forward to it.