My 360 quit out just as I was loading a matchmaking game on Halo 4

Mijn probleem

My 360 is about 6 years old, and it's been able to play most of my games without me ever even opening up the case. I never sent it in for repairs, it seemed like a waste of money and I think Microsoft is an unreliable company when it comes to customer support. Recently I've had to open it up three times in order to try to reduce fan rattling noise. But, this latest time it shut off right as I was loading a game, and I got the dreaded 3 red lights. I had a feeling it was because it overheated, it had issues with that before, getting 2 red lights (not like it was under-ventilated, but I took an air gun to it and sprayed a cloud of dust out). I looked on ifixit, and sure enough the most common cause of 3 red rings is overheating melting the solder. I was sure nothing was wrong with the input, power cables, or disc drive. Nothing else happened to indicate it, so I bought a RROD fix kit from this website.

Mijn oplossing

The repair process went smoothly until I lost one of the nylon washers. I searched every inch of my room in a 2 meter radius around my desk, but I couldn't find it. Luckily, Home Depot had nylon washers in the same size, and the rest of the process went smoothly. The fan even stopped rattling around. Although it took quite a while to clean all the old thermal grease off, and the heat sinks just did not want to be re-attached, everything came back together like clockwork. When I turned it on, it didn't have the 3 red lights anymore, it was blowing out a lot more heat, and the fan was rattling. I messed with the chassis screws until it stopped doing that but all in all, my 360 is better than before.

Mijn advies

The thing that would have made it easiest to work would have been a designated workstation with lots of room, and no clutter around it. As it is, I only had trouble with washers falling off the motherboard, but it would have helped.

There is also the idea that you might want an extra hand when re-attaching the heat sinks. It's a little difficult to hold the screws in, keep the washers on, hold the motherboard up, and keep the heat sink screw holes lined up while trying to line a screwdriver up to the screws so you can secure it. There was much cursing going on during this process.

In addition, I didn't have any special cleaner or cloth, so I just used eye glasses cleaners with nail polish remover, but I almost ran out scraping all the grease off! The initial layer of grease came off easiest with a tiny screwdriver (no I didn't damage anything, I was careful) but I had to use the cloth to get the last bits off and get it clean. Just wiping it had little effect though, I had to use my fingernail through the cloth to get most of the grease off.

And by the way, even though I didn't have problems with it at all, I wanted to mention something about reflowing the motherboard. When they say "You need to be careful and keep the heat gun moving..." they really mean you NEED to be careful and you MUST keep the heat gun moving, you could melt your CPU and GPU the rest of the way off or melt/fry other electronic parts.

The last thing I would say is that you really need to be careful when applying the thermal grease, if you get it on anything but the chip, you should wipe it off or it could cause problems.