Towel wrap curing Xbox 360 red ring of doom? Nah, not really.

thanks good times!

They can also simply remove the intercooler.

Just ordered 360 from DELL and it must have been one of the early shipments ( or do the new shipments have the same problem?) because I also have been treated to the "red light special". I'm suprised it did not hurt M'softs sales more than it did. This really sucks but M'soft promised to fix it for free though.

#2

It's because the GPU's were never mounted on correctly so re-soldering it works.

The towel temporarily fixes it by heating it up and sorta re-melting it to the bored. It works but at the same time it corrodes your 360 more....

Read the article next time in full. That's the reason why Joystiq includes links in the article.

I remember when we used to pray to the Amiga so that the disks would load. And we would try to load it while pressing the mouse buttons or blowing in the drive. My brother had a theory that it would help if you flipped the metal disk guard back and forth a few times.

Good times.

umm #3...... #2 was just making a funny stating that if you just "remove the intercooler" the xbox 360 will overheat by itself..lol.. no towel needed.

I've had to do the heatgun thing on my illegit no warranty/import Xbox 360 several times now as it eventually starts freezing up again within weeks/months. I don't even bother having the case on anymore. May seem strange but its worked every 10 or so times I've done it.

Is it just me, or is this the new, modern-day, self-destructive gamer habit now, as blowing in cartridges was in the older days (for those that aren't in the know, blowing dust out of cartidges would temporarily fix your game, but moisture from your breath would rust the metal pin things, amongst other problems).

The heat generated by running the unit in a towel is nothing next to a heat gun. And even if you did hit those temps inside, chips would be more likely to desolder themselves and move to the wrong spots than they would to solder themselves to the right spots. I mean, that's entropy, right? Things will tend toward disorder, not order.

Anyway, any device like the 360 will shut itself down before 100C (boiling point of water), it won't get to the 170C or more needed to melt the solder. Since it's EU-saleable, it uses lead-free solder which means the solder probably melts at 220C or so.

Here's the reality:
it's BS.

The case of the 360 is made of ABS plastic. ABS melts at 98C. If your case isn't melty when you take the towel off, the unit didn't get hot enough to do any soldering in there.

My 360 died with 3 red lights on November 7th. About 2-3 weeks before that, it showed red rings, but I turned it off and unplugged the power supply and replugged it and it worked again for a while. Does that mean I fixed it? Nope.

It's very easy for myths like this to take root, but they don't mean anything. That's why we have the scientific method.

Hmmm..no such news about PS3..despite the power unit being inside the console. You pay peanuts, you get a monkey of a console. But wait..you are not paying peanuts for 360..Actually a lot, just 100 dollars less than PS3 (not 200, as people try to claim) just 20% of XBOX games compatible, Overheating and noisy console, no Blu-ray, short support life (4 years for XBOX versus 7 years and counting for PS2; 3 years later HD becomes standard, 360 obselete, while the PS3 goes on for 8 years) and all you get after FIFTEEN MONTHS: lots and lots of shooters and nothing else.

Last night my 360's plug was loose and it sparked pretty badly when I turned the console on.

When I correctly inserted it, I saw the dreaded 3 rings of death!!! Immediately I turned it off and turned it back on.

Thankfully the 360 is operational but I'm scared it might've caused some kind of damage.

*starts praying*

sorry resistance: Fall of 360, but there arent enough PS3s in actual home environments to decide if they are working correctly or not. The 360 install base is several times that of the PS3. Just compare the amount of units sold at the same point in the consoles life as the PS3 ans you will see what i mean. compare apples to apples

Ok Joystiq you could have gone with a better picture for this one, like ferris bueller with the towel around his head, remember the fatherly advice "Wrap a hot towel round your head"

resistance: Fall of 360,

The problem with your solution is that the PS3 has no games. And I'd be careful what you say about shooters, when the only game worth anything on the PS3 is a shooter.