Bonetree Blog

The Towel Trick

So last night I sat down to play some GTA IV and about 20 minutes in the game crashed. Not a total shock, the 360 has crashed on me before and it’s never really been a big deal. Normally I just turn it off and then on again and it works. So I did that, but this time, I got the Red Ring Of Death:

photo credit: Dr Snafu

Pretty crappy right? Even though most of my friends who own Xbox 360s have had their consoles die on them, I figured I was lucky. I spoke to soon. I’ve had the thing for just over a year now and I guess it was about time. So I called up MS and they told me they’d repair or replace it. Probably because of the increasing failure rate Microsoft decided to extend the warranty on the thing from 90 days to 3 years, which works out nicely for me.

Standard procedure is for them to send you a box by courier into which you package your dead Xbox. Shipping is paid by MS, and you send it to their repair center in Texas. A couple of weeks later you get a (hopefully) working Xbox back. Sounds pretty straightforward but I’ve heard some horror stories.

Anyway, I was bitching about this to my friend Mark and he told me about the Towel Trick, which sounds like a pretty stupid hoax but you know what? I tried it and the damned thing works. My Xbox is working fine again. From what I can tell, the idea is that causing the “broken” 360 to overheat resets some flag and revives the thing. This has been reported to breathe only a bit more life into the console, so it won’t work as a permanent solution. I’m going return it for repair anyway, but at least I can use it until I ship it out. Now with my luck it’ll be working when they receive it and they’ll just send it back to me, at which point it’ll break again. Ugh. Here’s a video of the whole process:

Posted in Rants |
Tags: gta, rrod, xbox 360 |