So the other day one of my good buddies stopped by the house and started talking to me about his son’s Xbox 360 and how a few nights ago it was starting to freeze up and would make a lot of weird noises, and then last night it just went poof.

“Poof?” I asked him. “Yeah, it just wouldn’t come on, and had like 3 red circles on the power button.” he responded.

Well, the conversation continued a little bit, but it was pretty obvious he had received the Xbox 360 red ring of death, and that it’s very common even in the newest models. So I explained to him as simple as I could, that when the system overheats it melts certain parts in the system and messes it all up. Simply speaking of course. I told him that he had a few options, and that if he didn’t mind waiting or spending over a hundred dollars that I Microsoft could fix it for him in a few months.

Well he protested of course. $140 and the risk of losing certain parts or things just wasn’t a good deal to him. Not only that, but the wait kind of sucks, especially when your son just wants to blow shit up.

So wanting to lead him on a little more, I told him about a few stores online that repair them for like $85 within the course of a few weeks. He felt a little better about this option, but then I mentioned that some of these services lose major parts, literally steal the system, or flat out claim they just didn’t get your system even when your package has confirmation on it. (Happened to a few guys on IGN that i’ve spoken too.)

So by this point he was pretty upset about it, and was considering just buying his son a new system all together. But I told him I could fix the system, and that he could just leave it with me. He was pretty grateful to say the least.

But here’s where things get interesting.

Now I can usually fix a system in a little less than an hour, and I don’t bother looking at the tutorials or watching any of the videos any more. But I found myself just for reference sake, opening up our two top picks. When I discovered that James Dean had gone ahead and completely updated his main website and made even better videos. I was astonished to say the least. He also had added a few more videos for getting rid of the E74 Error and the dreaded 2 Red Lights.

So I flipped through a few of the videos to see all the updates. And James Dean blew my mind away, he had oversimplified the process to the point that anyone without even the slightest hint of technological background could figure this out. I mean, I’ve seen Soccer moms who could do this. He also made it extremely user friendly, and all of the tools he use are easily found around the house and can be substituted if not.

But I digress, I’m getting a bit off topic. So anyways, I opened up the system and began working, removing the x-clamp, etc. James dean also shows you how to test to make sure that all of your repairs went flawlessly and that you can close the system up.

If you do run into problems. Which I did a couple of times early on, mainly because I made a mistake on my part (got to cocky about not watching the videos… lol) they have live support and other sections on the site to help you diagnose any new problems and figure out what you may have forgotten.

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