This is really awesome

Mijn probleem

My Xbox 360 suffered the infamous "ring of death" syndrome after sitting around for more than a year. I was able to get it going again by opening up the unit and cleaned off old dust from the main board. It came back to life for couple hours of play time but the ring of death returned the next day. No amount of reset and cleaning would make that go away.

Mijn oplossing

After visiting various sites and recommendation on fixing this issue, I decided to give the repair kit from ifixit site a try. The package arrived just as expected. I spent about four hours doing the whole task and followed each step to the letter. As some suggested, the old thermal paste was quite difficult to remove. However, I had learned from a handyman that the good'o WD-40 can remove old glue marks and some very nasty sticky gooey stuff. So I gave WD-40 a try and it turned out very well. Of course, I still had to use rubbing alcohol to remove residual WD-40 (which was quite easy). I had also read from some comments about the poor choice of flat head screw and how one could potentially cause collateral damages to adjacent components if not careful. I was being careful all the way until having to tighten the last screw when the tragedy occurred. While one had was holding steady the main board and another hand tightening the screw, the screw driver slipped and crashed onto the board. Upon inspecting the main board it became evident that a small capacitor next to a RAM chip was completely smashed into bits. Needless to say that I was quite depressed with all the time and money spent which led to this. After recovering myself, I took a multimeter to inspect the readings of the smashed capacitor and other similar parts. To my surprise, they all returned similar readings. That's when I decided to put Xbox back together and try it out. To my ultimate surprise and pleasure, the unit booted up with all green lights and started loading games. It's been several days since the repair and the Xbox is still functioning like a charm (knock on the wood). I guess the smashed capacitor might be one of the de-coupling caps for RAM chips. If so, it might be just a dumb luck for me that I didn't damage other more vital components.

Mijn advies

My only advise is be extra careful when tightening the heat-sink screws. It'd nice if the screws can be tighten with a socket wrench. Overall the kits and instructions from iFixit site really worked out great for me.