7 Bit Arcade

The inevitable occurred at approximately 11:23 on Friday the some date of December. My second, that’s right, second XBOX 360 decided to red ring. Not just any red ring, o no, it decided to whirr a little, then give me the false pretense that the red ring was some kind of sick practical joke and was going to work again, but then it decided to start smelling of electricity.

So I decided to set out and do some research to find out why the red ring of death actually occurs and to dismiss the old wives tale that it breaks due to ferrets in the operating system.

The Technical Speel

This is why, according to Microsoft, the Red Ring occurs.

Overall, it all comes down to overheating, the sort of problem electronics should only have these days if they are used in the desert.

• The problems usually start with the graphics chip, a piece of hardware that Microsoft decided to cut costs on by creating it in house. Eventually, they went back to the vendor to produce a proper chip that would dissipate less heat.
• The Problem eventually comes down to how the graphics chip was soldered into the system. Courtesy of Wikipedia, the full description follows:

One possible cause of the General Hardware Error may be cold solder joints. The added mass of the CSP chips (including the GPU and CPU) absorb the heat flow that allows proper soldering of the lead-free solders on the motherboard, therefore, the solder has not properly melted underneath these chips, which can lead to voids (air bubbles) and weak spots in the solder known as cold solder joints. Because of prolonged constant temperature changes inside the console, the voids cause cracking.

So it is all about soldering. What makes me wonder, is why would such a firm like Microsoft allow the consoles to go out with this problem.With the amount of money that goes through Microsoft towers each day, they should be able to design a console that would iron out these flaws once and for all. One would think that the XBOX Elite would not have these problems as Microsoft will have sat down and spoken about it.

But no, they have not sat down and spoken about it. There was no listening to fans complaints (a sit down with annoyed users would have been enough, even with engineers who found out what the problem was), the only change that Microsoft made was to give an XBOX 3 years warranty if the XBOX died due to red ringage, a term that is both poignant and sexually referring.

This brings me to the next problem. I would like to know if Microsoft keep track of the serial numbers that are on the XBOX’ that are sent out when a customers XBOX breaks. This should be a foregone conclusion, however, on trying to return my second XBOX, it was rejected as there was no serial number recorded on the Microsoft system. How could this happen? Microsoft must have presumed that this console would not have broken again but yes it did.

Rant Over

I asked Twitter why they thought the red ring occurred.

So a rubbish game caused it. That makes perfect sense. (Although Stevie enjoyed this game, but he also enjoys doing rude things to badgers.)

Conclusion

What I have come to presume about big companies is that their caring for the little man has got so small and insignificant that one day they will be selling us just lies and fake promises of a console that should work.

There is no way that Microsoft can solve this problem now as there are too many XBOX’s in consumers homes, so trying to replace them all would be a military style job. The only way to repair this damage is that when the XBOX 720 or BillGatesConsoleSystemExtreme comes out, that they make sure this farce does not occur again.

Adam Done.

How others have “solved” their red ring problems…

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