MattGruber: The Xbox 360 Repair Man

My brother recently gave me an old Xbox 360 that had the red ring of death.  He could have sent the thing in himself a couple of years ago to get it fixed for free by Microsoft, but that would’ve taken a few weeks and he needed to play the new hotness so bad that he just went out and dropped two or three hundred bucks on a new one.  Sound like the dumbest shit you ever heard?  Well, wait until you hear what I did.

Instead of figuring out whether or not the thing was still under warranty, which it probably was given the three year extension that Microsoft gave, I decided to just crack the shit open and go all MacGruber on it.  Given that this voids any warranty the thing might have still had, and given that I have a hard enough time zipping my jeans up without catching my cod piece, this was probably not the brightest thing a man ever did.

Believe it or not, though, I fixed that shit in half a day and have been playing Gears of War 2 for about a week now.  It actually was not very hard at all, so if you have a RROD Xbox 360 lying around and you are either too impatient to wait for Microsoft to fix it or don’t think that the shit is still under warranty, I recommend that you send it to me along with your bank account and social security numbers.  Or you could just fix it yourself by the following the instructions below.

Here is some shit to help you through the process:

The Parts:

Basically all that you need is a couple of torx head screwdrivers, which you can get at Lowe’s for like 6 bucks, and some thermal paste, which they sell at most Best Buy’s for about 10 bucks.

I also bought some screws, rubber washers, and nuts that the vids below told me I needed, but I’m pretty sure that I shouldn’t even have done that.  The screws on the 360 are special screws that have an inny on one side to put another screw in, so if you go and buy some regular ones to replace them like I did you will have some leftover screws at the end that were supposed to go into the back end of the original kind of screw.  My shit works just fine, so I don’t think that the leftover screws are really that important. As long as you don’t treat your Xbox 360 like Lawrence Taylor treats 15 year old homeless prostitutes, you’ll be just fine.

If you buy the screws and other crap, you will want something that is flat under the screw head and doesn’t have a pointy bottom. Like a pan head screw or some shit like that. The original screws are about a half inch long, so you will want something comparable in length.

Something like this, but a little shorter in length

You will need 8 screws, 4 nuts, and 8 rubber washers. The sizes are metric M5-.80.  This stuff should cost you about another 8 bucks or so, so overall you should only have to spend about 25 bucks max to fix the thing.

The Fix:

Now that you have all the shit you will need, just look at these youtube clips below and do what the nice gentleman tells you.

Basically, all that you will be doing is dismantling the Xbox, putting that thermal paste on the main chips to keep them cool, and getting rid of the X-clamps.

He will tell you that you need a special hook thingy to take the X-clamps off, but you can easily do it with a flat head screwdriver by just putting the screwdriver underneath the clamp right by the screw and twisting it upwards.  This is pretty much the hardest part, so if you can do this you will be money.

Other than that, though, this dude has it on lockdown, so just follow him and you will be getting destroyed by 6 year olds on Call of Duty in no time. Remember not to take it personally when they call you a fag.

How to open the Xbox:

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Fix Part 1

Fix Part 2

Matty