Xbox Troubleshooting

Yes, sad to say, someone could of easily said that the XBOX 360 was rushed to darn quickly, in time for the christmas season and the following years Consumer Electronics Show, held annually in Los Vegas. Me being an Apple computer user, I was never the hugest fan when it came to Microsoft products. I did eventually end up buying one, because years before I made the switch from PC to Apple, I had fell in love with Project Gotham 3.

Ok, so $400 and $50 for the game, I ended up thinking I got a fair deal with my XBOX 360. I was having a ball with the insane graphics, and just winning cars left and right. I have to admit, I am a huge F1 race fan at heart, so I seriously thought I was going to wear the heck out of the thing. A few months of hardcore gameplay between work, and watching hockey and footballl, I eventually won the Ferrari F430.

So, the day after I won the Ferrari F430, I wanted to take the prancing horse out to the Nurburgring and lay some serious Pirelli P-Zeros and while entering the Nordschliefe area while departing the current GP track, my game just stopped! I was puzzled and couldn't figure it out for the life of me what was wrong. The power connections and video/sound connections were solid, so that was not the problem.

I had examined the console, and happened to find on the power button, a ring of red lights blinking. Since I had taken automotive school in high school, I have noticed that the blinking red lights could of been some trouble code. Instead of calling Microsoft, since I am not a huge fan of them at all, heh, I decided to pursue the problem using the world wide web. Looking on various websites, forums, endless google search strings, I had found out the problem was a general hardware failure.

I had a few options thought that I could examine.
Send the box to Microsoft to get it repaired. This would take copious amounts of time, and some cash outlay for shipping and overall repairs to the console.
Just simply throw out the unit, and spend another $400 to get back to having fun driving my Ferrari's.
Further explore a suitable possibility to repair the Console myself, regardless of voiding the warranty.

The solution I found, and believe it or not worked, was the Three Red Light Fix Guide. This was a series of videos, along with a companion PDF guide demonstrating how to repair your XBOX 360 in the neighborhood of an hour's time. If you are either mechanically inclined or not, I found the xbox 360 repair video easy to follow through with their simple, easy to understand terminology and step-by-step instruction.

If you do not want to send the box back to Microsoft, and maybe save money in the process while learning more about your XBOX 360, check out the Three Red Light Repair Guide Here.