Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Getting in touch with my inner geek
Yesterday I searched around online for a reasonably priced repair shop for my ailing Xbox. Most of them seem to cost $75 or more. I seem to recall paying about $150 or less for my Xbox when it was new (in 2004), so I shopped around for a new one. I could not find one! There were used and refurbished ones everywhere, but no brand new ones. What the hell? Did those bastards discontinue making them? I was quite peeved. I am NOT shelling out $300-$400 for an Xbox 360. There are still plenty of original Xbox games that I haven’t played yet, and I can get them for a third of the price of the 360 games.
So anyway, after all this browsing around, I found tons of resources for fixing your own Xbox. One person said if you’re familiar with poking around a PC, you’ll do fine poking around an Xbox. I felt emboldened by this (after being disheartened at the disconinuation of the Xbox). I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m technically inclined, I’ve added and removed hardware from my PC, and the damn thing is out of warranty anyway. What will it hurt?”
So I went to my local Fry’s Electronics and picked up one of these:
It’s a torx tool, which is similar to allen keys, only the head is shaped differently. If that sentence sounded like Swahili to you, it’s a type of screwdriver, for screws with specialty heads. Instead of a flat line or a Phillips “plus” shape, the slots for these stupid screws are shaped like asterisks. Wikipedia says it’s because it causes less slippage, but I personally think it’s to make it harder for just anyone to open the console. Why else would they hide six screws under stickers and rubber feet?
So anyway, I’m using this guide to help me correctly open the thing without tearing pieces off like a frustrated gorilla. After cleaning the lens to the DVD drive, my Xbox plays games again! Unfortunately it still makes lots of weird accessing sounds and takes longer to load, so I think it’s on its way out. I’ve ordered a replacement DVD drive, so when that gets here I’m going to flex my geek muscles and refurbish my own Xbox, yippee!
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Categories: • Random acts of geekery