Topic: Xbox 360... towel trick?

[Quemaqua]

First I've heard of it.  Freaking weird.

[JacksRag(e)]

Yea, I've heard about this one before...it basically overheats the 360 so that some of the solder joints on the mainboard temporarily reattach, or something like that.  This only lasts as long as it takes for the joints to reconfigure back to their original orientation, where you then have to do this trick again.
Buh, a temporary fix for something that should not have been a problem in the first place.

[iPPi]

Hearing stuff like this makes me worry about my 360.  I mean, there's nothing wrong with mine aside from the occasional freeze where I need to reboot the system, but no hardware failures, but still, it really shows that MS screwed up with the 360 hardware somehow.

I mean, it's a great system and all, but damn reliability and clearly the QA was piss poor.

[Cobra951]

Yeah, the chips are soldered on instead of socketed.  And the requirement for a small form factor makes it difficult to extract enough heat from the system.  Bad combination.  Mine is vertical, but sideways.  Heat blows out to the right of where I'm sitting, into a space that's much bigger than the back of this piece of furniture it sits on.  If I let it blow against the wood at the back, the wood gets almost too hot to touch.

I had heard about the towel trick before.  Someone created a youtube video about using a hot-air gun to recondition the solder more properly.  It starts with a red ring of death, and ends with a the system booting correctly.