Well My xbox went pop about a month or 2 ago, it would display artifacts on the screen and then freeze but typical sods law it wouldn’t RROD.

(Actually I also got home to an unhappy housemate who’s 360 has just died refusing to output any video, his is one of the newer one with HDMI, although it’s not displaying an RROD We suspend the GPU has fried, as to if Microsoft will fix his for free who knows 🙁 )

Oh and it’s just over 3 years old to boot so that’s 2 reasons why Microsoft probably wouldn’t fix it for free 🙁

Decided to give one of those X-CLAMP kits a try from ebay (I’ll dig the seller details out later if someone wants them), pulled the thing apart, changed the x-clamps for some nice bolts and put it back together…Turned it on and RROD, damn i’d killed it.  I assumed that perhaps i’d overtightened the retaining bolts on the heatsink.

For some reason… Probably some bizzare idea that it would magically fix itself I left the thing running on the RROD for a couple of minutes then restarted it, Surprisingly it came back to life.

Early days yet as i’ve only run it for about 30minutes or so, but it’s possible I didn’t kill it after all 🙂  Oh and no more artefacts/lockups during those 30minutes either (where as before it would start displaying graphical artefacts after about 1 minute and lockup with the first 5)

Only problem is I don’t think i put it together quite right, or I misaligned something ever so slightly as the top of the front (silvery) cover on the dvd tray is rubbing on the plastic front panel for the 360 stopping the drive from ejecting properly…  Although I suspect that won’t take to much effort to fix.