So I have been working with a new company for the past 8 weeks or so. It has been a fun time. It is a start up company that does electronics recycling. Basically we pay people for old electronics, refurbish them and resell them. A couple of projects I have worked on so far have been dealing with vendors in China for business arbitrage opportunities as well as a lot of technical work. The biggest project yet, was buying 80 returned xbox 360s. It wasn't until later on that I figured out the reason they were returned was because of so many of them having problems. These wouldn't be so easy to process as fixing broken ones requires you to open them up and replace the two heatsink mounts on the motherboard. It is not difficult, but it is time consuming.
Of the 80 we bought, 30 worked fine out of the box. Fifty of them had various problems. The majority of the broken ones suffered from the Red ring of death or RROD. A few here and there had the e74 or a disc drive problem. I looked up how to fix the RROD and it seemed doable for me. I will post a guide on how to fix it with some good pictures from a DSLR camera we got in too! I get to play with so many gadgets. I have attempted to fix 30 xboxes thus far, 25 I have successfully fixed, there are 5 that will be parted out so far.
I am doing the X-clamp fix and replacing the heatsink mounts with individual screws. It seems like all of the problems that happen to the xbox are caused by the way the heatsinks are mounted, and how the system deals with heat. Maybe I will watercool my xbox at home. That would be a fun project
