About a month ago, when I was settling down with my wife to watch a quick episode of Cake Boss via Netflix, I turned on the Xbox 360, but all the sudden, I received (for the third time on this Xbox) a nice present from Microsoft: the dreaded red ring of death (RROD).
"Not to fear!" said I, "I'll get a free warranty repair, like I did the first two times this happened!"
Little did I know. Luckily, however, I found a guy via Craigslist who repairs Xboxes and lives in St. Peters, MO (not too far from here!).
He has a small website (Xbox 360 Repair) with a little information about his repair process, but the bottom line is that he charges only $35 (and nothing—$0—if he can't fix it) to take a sad Xbox 360 and turn it into a happy Xbox 360. And he does the repair right—he uses a solder reflow machine to fix the broken connections between the Xbox 360's GPU and the motherboard, then turns up the fan speed to compensate for the overworked GPU.
Just wanted to post the information here for (a) my own future reference—the thing will likely break again!—and (b) for anyone else in the St. Louis area who has a broken Xbox 360. Because for some people it's an addition... and who wants to live in the real world when Xbox LIVE is calling? ;-)
Comments
Another reason to use this guy's service before attempting a repair using some other method: instead of doing more damage to your 360, he actually tries fixing the problem.
The 'towel' method? Say goodbye to your Xbox.
The 'clamp the chip' method? Well, maybe you'll get in one more Halo session before the thing dies for good.
The 'I'm gonna do this thing with a heat gun' method? Yeah, good luck.
Do you have the contact information for the guy who repaired you Xbox360?
The information should be on his website, on the Contact Us page: https://sites.google.com/site/thexbox360repair/contact-us