Well, it finally happened.

My Xbox 360 has stopped functioning.

Or rather, it hasn't. I know it's confusing, but let me explain.

By this time, everyone here should have heard about the Red Rings of Death problem, better known as the 3RROD problem. The problem relates to a common hardware problem that has plagued the Xbox 360 since launch. Some figures estimate that failure rate for the Xbox 360 could even be as high as 16%. This means that for every 100 Xbox's sold, 16 of them will more than likely break within the first year. Other sources claim that this number is even higher and could be as high as 50%. Compare that with failure rates of between 2% and 3% for the iPod Nano and you can see that the failure rate is quite dismal when compared to other high-end entertainment devices.

One of the things about the 360, is that it is RoHS compliant. This basically means that little to no hazardous materials have been used in the manufacturing of this product, so that when said product gets thrown on some dump site, the impact on the environment would be minimal.

RoHS compliancy requires that you use lead-free solder. While adequate as a soldering solution, it is definitely not of the same quality as lead solder.

Basically, as you use your Xbox more and more, heat gets generated. This heat will slightly warp the motherboard which is a reasonably normal reaction to heat. The problem here is that slowly but surely, after repeated warping, the solder used with the GPU basically starts tearing loose. After a while, your GPU becomes partially or even completely unseated from it's socket. My symptoms (for about 15 minutes) included an apparent loss of the colour red (everything was tinged in an ugly yellow-brown-green colour) and lines running accross the top and bottom of the screen.

I then tried to switch the 360 off and back on again, which then finally resulted in my video dissapearing.

The strange thing about my problem though, is that I do not have the 3RROD. I half expected it, but instead, the Xbox boots safely. You can hear audio in the background and afterwards as you shuffle the menu items around, you can hear those too.

This puzzled me so I started looking around online for answers. I actually found a few other people with the same problem that I had, also puzzled by the fact that there was no 3RROD.

Here's the problem that I share with them. The Xbox 360 has a 1 year warranty. Only the 3RROD is covered by a 3 year warranty after Microsoft has admitted that the 3RROD problem is due to a manufacturing fault. So in essence, even though the problem we have is related, we do not have the 3RROD, therefore we are not covered by the warranty.

At this point in time, I got rather dissapointed. Until I found that quite a few people have successfully fixed their own 3RROD (and no video/just audio) problem, using a simple little fix that has been dubbed, the "X-Clamp Fix". This involves removing a specific clamp from the board and then replacing it with standard steel and nylon washers! I know, it sounds a bit incredible, but lots of people have reported success with this fix.

There are even Youtube videos detailing the fix:

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[Video courtesy of YouTube]

So what is a man that is out of warranty to do? There's only one thing for it. Attempt to fix it myself. Once I have all the parts together, I will let everyone know about the success (or epic fail) that I had trying to fix this. The things useless to me anyway, so I might as well try.

Wish me luck!