Posted: Apr 18, 2013 11:21 am
Matt_B wrote:DarthHelmet86 wrote:Animavore wrote:I didn't realise the upside-down PS was rampant, I thought it was just me
I too had to flip my PS1 by the end, my current one does not suffer from that problem.
I don't understand wrapping the towel around the 360 one, the red ring problem was caused by heat so wrapping it up seems rather stupid. Unless it is damp or something? Still blocking the fans from getting the heat out doesn't seem like the best way to stop the problem and keeping the heat in wouldn't fix it, at least not for good.
The original theory behind it was that running hot over a long period of time caused the solder to crack resulting in loose connections. This could potentially be fixed by a short blast of intense heat which would melt the solder allowing it to flow back into place, hence the towel trick.
Of course this was always going to be a bit of a long shot, but there were a lot of broken 360s out there, and I'm sure that it worked for more than a few of them.
I sure do know about the broken 360's I had two of them and in both cases (one of which was over 3 years from purchase) I took them back to the store where I got them and they replaced them. The problem with the melting the solder trick is that eventually it will fail again, seems a very desperate thing to do doubly so when, here at least, a lot of stores quickly accepted the fault and replaced consoles and I don't think Microsoft was too far behind in offering free repairs if you paid to send it to them (which is what the stores here did, they replaced the console sent the broken one to get repaired then resold it).
Still knowing of people claiming to be able to fix the red ring fault by remelting the solder I never heard of doing it by wrapping a towel around the console. I heard about people opening their consoles and doing the melting with soldering irons.